The effects of estimation of heteroscedasticity on stochastic kriging.

In this paper, we study the effects of using smoothed variance estimates in place of the sample variances on the performance of stochastic kriging (SK). Different variance estimation methods are investigated and it is shown through numerical examples that such a replacement leads to improved predictive performance of SK. An SK-based dual metamodeling approach is further proposed to obtain an efficient simulation budget allocation rule and consequently more accurate prediction results.