Nonparametric estimation of the variogram and its spectrum

In the study of intrinsically stationary spatial processes, a new nonparametric variogram estimator is proposed through its spectral representation. The methodology is based on estimation of the variogram's spectrum by solving a regularized inverse problem through quadratic programming. The estimated variogram is guaranteed to be conditionally negative-definite. Simulation shows that our estimator is flexible and generally has smaller mean integrated squared error than the parametric estimator under model misspecification. Our methodology is applied to a spatial dataset of decadal temperature changes. © 2011 Biometrika Trust.