|
Abstract:
|
Understanding the factors influencing urban water use is critical for meeting demand and conserving resources. To analyze the relationships between urban household-level water demand and potential drivers, we develop a method for Bayesian variable selection in partially linear additive regression models, particularly suited for high-dimensional spatio-temporally dependent data. Our approach combines a spike-and-slab prior distribution with a modified version of the Bayesian group lasso to simultaneously perform a selection of null, linear, and nonlinear models and to penalize regression splines to prevent overfitting. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method through a simulation study and provide comparisons with existing methods. We illustrate the methodology on a case study to estimate and quantify the uncertainty of the associations between several environmental and demographic predictors and spatio-temporally varying household-level urban water demand in Tampa, FL.
|
