Evaluation of peak functions on ultra-coarse grids

Integration of sampled data arises in many practical applications, where the integrand function is available from experimental measurements only. One extensive field of research is the problem of pest monitoring and control where an accurate evaluation of the population size from the spatial density distribution is required for a given pest species. High aggregation population density distributions (peak functions) are an important class of data that often appear in this problem. The main difficulty associated with the integration of such functions is that the function values are usually only available at a few locations; therefore, new techniques are required to evaluate the accuracy of integration as the standard approach based on convergence analysis does not work when the data are sparse. Thus, in this paper, we introduce the new concept of ultra-coarse grids for high aggregation density distributions. Integration of the density function on ultra-coarse grids cannot provide the prescribed accuracy because of insufficient information (uncertainty) about the integrand function. Instead, the results of the integration should be treated probabilistically by considering the integration error as a random variable, and we show how the corresponding probabilities can be calculated. Handling the integration error as a random variable allows us to evaluate the accuracy of integration on very coarse grids where asymptotic error estimates cannot be applied.