A stationary spatial model is an idealization and we expect that the true dependence structures of physical phenomena are spatially varying, but how should we handle this non-stationarity in practice? We study the challenges involved in applying a flexible non-stationary model to a dataset of annual precipitation in the conterminous US, where exploratory data analysis shows strong evidence of a...

24 In the course of its interaction with the world, the human nervous system must constantly estimate 25 various variables in the surrounding environment. Past research indicates that environmental variables 26 may be represented as probabilistic distributions of a priori information (priors). Priors for 27 environmental variables that do not change much over time have been widely studied. Litt...