Kriging and Semivariogram Deconvolution in the Presence of Irregular Geographical Units

This paper presents a methodology to conduct geostatistical variography and interpolation on areal data measured over geographical units (or blocks) with different sizes and shapes, while accounting for heterogeneous weight or kernel functions within those units. The deconvolution method is iterative and seeks the point-support model that minimizes the difference between the theoretically regularized semivariogram model and the model fitted to areal data. This model is then used in area-to-point (ATP) kriging to map the spatial distribution of the attribute of interest within each geographical unit. The coherence constraint ensures that the weighted average of kriged estimates equals the areal datum.