A Spatio-temporal CP decomposition analysis of New England region in the US

Spatio temporal data consist of measurement for one or more raster fields such as weather, traffic volume, crime rate, or disease incidents. Advances in modern technology have increased the number of available information for this type of data hence the rise of multidimensional data. In this paper we take advantage of the multidimensional structure of the data but also its temporal and spatial structure. In fact, we will be using the NCAR Climate Data Gateway website which provides data discovery and access services for global and regional climate model data. The daily values of total precipitation (prec), maximum (tmax), and minimum (tmin) temperature are combined to create a multidimensional data called tensor (a multidimensional array). In this paper, we propose a spatio temporal principal component analysis to initialize CP decomposition component. We take full advantage of the spatial and temporal structure of the data in the initialization step for cp component analysis. The performance of our method is tested via comparison with most popular initialization method. We also run a clustering analysis to further show the performance of our analysis.