Separable spatio‐temporal kriging for fast virtual sensing

Environmental monitoring is a task that requires to surrogate system-wide information with limited sensor readings. Under the proximity principle, an environmental monitoring system can be based on the virtual sensing logic and then rely on distance-based prediction methods, foremostly spatio-temporal kriging. The last one is cumbersome with large datasets, but we show that a suitable separability assumption reduces its computational cost to an extent broader than considered typically. Only spatial interpolation needs to be performed in a centralized way, while forecasting can be delegated to each sensor. This simplification is related to the fact that two separate models are involved, one in time and one in the space domain. Any of the two models can be replaced without re-estimating the other under a composite likelihood (CL) approach. Moreover, the use of convenient spatial and temporal models eases up computation, not only in the CL approach, but also in maximum likelihood estimation. We show that this perspective on kriging allows to perform virtual sensing even in the case of tall datasets.