Spatial Gibbs Sampling

Spatial Gibbs sampling applies the Gibbs sampler — a coordinate-wise Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm — to models where observations are arranged in space and nearby locations are statistically dependent. By exploiting the conditional independence implied by a spatial neighbourhood structure, each site is updated one at a time given its neighbours, making posterior inference tractable for Markov random fields, Gaussian random fields, and hierarchical geostatistical models.