Is there an R package that runs "Spatial Vector Autoregression"?

Question

I am looking for an R package which can run "Spatial Vector Autoregression". tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17421770701346689

According to Chen and Conley (2001), this is a "vector autoregression (VAR) whose coefficient matrix and shock covariance matrix are functions of economic distances between agents. The impact of other agents’ variables on the conditional mean of a given agent’s variable is a function of their economic distances from this agent. Similarly, covariances of VAR shocks are functions of distances between agents in the previous period, a property we refer to as being isotropic."

(Chen, X & Conley, T.G. (2001) A new semiparametric spatial model for panel time series, Journal of Econometrics, 105, 59–83)

Surprisingly, however, I could only see until "Spatial Autoregression" which is still not what I need for my purpose. May I get help finding the package for this please? Otherwise, may I know an official way to run this Spatial Vector Autoregression model using R programming?

Answer 1

I think I've found what you're looking for, devtools::install_github("James-Thorson/VAST"). VAST stands for "Vector-Autoregressive Spatio-Temporal." This package is a wrapper around a package that incorporates spatial modeling. Essentially it adds to it.

You can see coding examples here. If you want to look at help, use ?VAST::VAST and select one of the three hyperlinks at the bottom of the short description and details (make_settings, fit_model, and plot_results).

Please note:

When I installed this package to check out what it included, it came back with a conflict that the package TMB required an earlier version of the Matrix package. I had not had TMB installed before installing this package. I had no issues installing TMB independently (without a conflict with the version of the Matrix package). However when I called the library VAST it still gave me that error. When I called the library TMB, then the library VAST I didn't receive the warning and both libraries loaded.