New Parsimonious Multivariate Spatial Model: Spatial Envelope

Dimension reduction provides a useful tool for analyzing high dimensional data. The recently developed $\mathit{\text{Envelope}}$ method is a parsimonious version of the classical multivariate regression model through identifying a minimal reducing subspace of the responses. However, existing envelope methods assume an independent error structure in the model. While the assumption of independence is convenient, it does not address the additional complications associated with spatial or temporal correlations in the data. In this article, we introduce a $\mathit{\text{Spatial}}\mathit{\text{Envelope}}$ method for dimension reduction in the presence of dependencies across space. We study the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and show that the asymptotic variance of the estimated regression coefficients under the spatial envelope model is smaller than that from the traditional maximum likelihood estimation. Furthermore, we present a computationally efficient approach for inference. The efficacy of the new approach is investigated through simulation studies and an analysis of an Air Quality Standard (AQS) dataset from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).