Disjunctive Kriging with Hard and Imprecise Data

This paper presents a methodology for assessing local probability distributions by disjunctive kriging when the available data set contains some imprecise measurements, like noisy or soft information or interval constraints. The basic idea consists in replacing the set of imprecise data by a set of pseudohard data simulated from their posterior distribution; an iterative algorithm based on the Gibbs sampler is proposed to achieve such a simulation step. The whole procedure is repeated many times and the final result is the average of the disjunctive kriging estimates computed from each simulated data set. Being data-independent, the kriging weights need to be calculated only once, which enables fast computing. The simulation procedure requires encoding each datum as a pre-posterior distribution and assuming a Markov property to allow the updating of pre-posterior distributions into posterior ones. Although it suffers some imperfections, disjunctive kriging turns out to be a much more flexible approach than conditional expectation, because of the vast class of models that allows its computation, namely isofactorial models.