The multilateral spatial integer‐valued process of order 1

Abstract

In spatial count data analysis, modeling with a multilateral lattice structure presents some important challenges. They include both the model construction and the estimation of the model parameters, since the structure accommodates the left, right, top, bottom, and diagonal site effects. Thus, the multilateral spatial process unifies all the popular spatial subclasses that include the unilateral, Rook, Bishop, and Queen models and, hence, makes it suitable for a wide variety of applications. This paper introduces a first‐order multilateral integer‐valued spatial process, based on a binomial thinning mechanism and some innovation term, under both stationary and nonstationary conditions. The estimation of parameters is handled by the conditional maximum likelihood estimation (CML) approach. Simulation experiments are implemented to assess the consistency of the CML estimators in the stationary and nonstationary multilateral spatial model and its subclasses, based on different grid sizes and under both covariate and noncovariate designs. The proposed model, along with its subclasses are applied to real datasets.