Screening and optimization of interpolation methods for mapping soil-borne polychlorinated biphenyls

There is yet no scientific consensus, and for now, on how to choose the optimal interpolation method and its parameters for mapping soil-borne organic pollutants. Take the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) for instance, we present the comparison of some classic interpolation methods using a high-resolution soil monitoring database. The results showed that empirical Bayesian kriging (EBK) has the highest accuracy for predicting the total PCB concentration, while root mean squared error (RMSE) in inverse distance weighting (IDW) is among the highest in these interpolation methods. The logarithmic transformation of non-normally distributed data contributed to enhance considerably the semivariogram for modeling in kriging interpolation. The increasing of search neighborhood reduced IDW's RMSE, but slightly affected in ordinary kriging (OK), while both of them resulted in over smooth of prediction map. The existence of outliers made the difference between two points increase sharply, and thereby weakening spatial autocorrelation and decreasing the accuracy. As predicted error increased continuously, the prediction accuracy of different interpolation methods reached unanimity gradually. The attempt of the assisted interpolation algorithm did not significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the IDW method. This study constructed a standardized workflow for interpolation, which could reduce human error to reach higher interpolation accuracy for mapping soil-borne PCBs.