Abstract
Agricultural meteorological information is an important resource that affects farmers' income, food security, and agricultural conditions. Thus, such data are used in various fields that are responsible for planning, enforcing, and evaluating agricultural policies. The meteorological information obtained from automatic weather observation systems operated by rural development agencies contains missing values owing to temporary mechanical or communication deficiencies. It is known that missing values lead to reduction in the reliability and validity of the model. In this study, the hierarchical Bayesian spatio-temporal model suggests replacements for missing values because the meteorological information includes spatio-temporal correlation. The prior distribution is very important in the Bayesian approach. However, we found a problem where the spatial decay parameter was not converged through the trace plot. A suitable spatial decay parameter, estimated on the bias of root-mean-square error (RMSE), which was determined to be the difference between the predicted and observed values. The latitude, longitude, and altitude were considered as covariates. The estimated spatial decay parameters were 0.041 and 0.039, for the spatio-temporal model with latitude and longitude and for latitude, longitude, and altitude, respectively. The posterior distributions were stable after the spatial decay parameter was fixed. root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and bias were calculated for model validation. Finally, the missing values were generated using the independent Gaussian process model.
