Fixed-Domain Asymptotics for Spatial Periodograms

Abstract

The periodogram for a spatial process observed on a lattice is often used to estimate the spectral density. The bases for such estimators are two asymptotic properties that periodograms commonly possess: (1) the periodogram at a particular frequency is approximately unbiased for the spectral density, and (2) the correlation of the periodogram at distinct frequencies is approximately zero. For spatial data, it is often appropriate to use fixed-domain asymptotics in which the observations get increasingly dense in some fixed region as their number increases. Using fixed-domain asymptotics, this article shows that standard asymptotic results for periodograms do not apply and that using the periodogram of the raw data can yield highly misleading results. But by appropriately filtering the data before computing the periodogram, it is possible to obtain results similar to the standard asymptotic results for spatial periodograms.