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A key problem in the application of kriging is the definition of a local neighborhood in which to search for the most relevant data. A usual practice consists in selecting data close to the location targeted for prediction and, at the same time, distributed as uniformly as possible around this location, in order to discard data conveying redundant information. This approach may however not be optimal, insofar as it does not account for the data spatial correlation. To improve the kriging neighborhood definition, we first examine the effect of including one or more data and present equations in order to quickly update the kriging weights and kriging variances. These equations are then applied to design a stepwise selection algorithm that progressively incorporates the most relevant data, i.e., the data that make the kriging variance decrease more. The proposed algorithm is illustrated on a soil contamination dataset.

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Gaussian random fields (GRF) conditional simulation is a key ingredient in many spatial statistics problems for computing Monte-Carlo estimators and quantifying uncertainties on non-linear functionals of GRFs conditional on data. Conditional simulations are known to often be computer intensive, especially when appealing to matrix decomposition approaches with a large number of simulation points. Here we study the settings where conditioning observations are assimilated batch-sequentially, i.e. one point or batch of points at each stage. Assuming that conditional simulations have been performed at a previous stage, we aim at taking advantage of already available sample paths and by-products in order to produce updated conditional simulations at minimal cost. We provide explicit formulas allowing to update an ensemble of sample paths conditioned on n ≥ 0 observations to an ensemble conditioned on n + q observations, for arbitrary q ≥ 1. Compared to direct approaches, the proposed formulas prove to substantially reduce computational complexity. Moreover, these formulas enable explicitly exhibiting how the q "new" observations are updating the "old" sample paths. Detailed complexity calculations highlighting the benefits of our approach with respect to state-of-the-art algorithms are provided and are complemented by numerical experiments.

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The sequential algorithm is widely used to simulate Gaussian random fields. However, a rigorous application of this algorithm is impractical and some simplifications are required, in particular a moving neighborhood has to be defined. To examine the effect of such restriction on the quality of the realizations, a reference case is presented and several parameters are reviewed, mainly the histogram, variogram, indicator variograms, as well as the ergodic fluctuations in the first and second-order statistics. The study concludes that, even in a favorable case where the simulated domain is large with respect to the range of the model, the realizations may poorly reproduce the second-order statistics and be inconsistent with the stationarity and ergodicity assumptions. Practical tips such as the 'multiple-grid strategy' do not overcome these impediments. Finally, extending the original algorithm by using an ordinary kriging should be avoided, unless an intrinsic random function model is sought after.