Visualisation for large-scale Gaussian updates

In geostatistics (and also in other applications in science and engineering) we are now performing updates on Gaussian process models with thousands of components. These large-scale inferences involve computational challenges, because the updating equations cannot be solved as written, owing to the size and cost of the matrix operations. They also involve representational challenges, to account for judgements of heterogeneity concerning the underlying fields, and diverse sources of observations. Diagnostics are particularly valuable in this situation. We present a diagnostic and visualisation tool for large-scale Gaussian updates, the ‘medal plot’. This shows the initial and updated uncertainty for each observation, and also summarises the sharing of information across observations, as a proxy for the sharing of information across the state vector. It allows us to ‘sanity-check’ the code implementing the update, but it can also reveal unexpected features in our modelling. We discuss computational issues for large-scale updates, and we illustrate with an application to assess mass trends in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.