Conditionally autoregressive (CAR) models have been extensively used for the analysis of spatial data in diverse areas, such as demography, economy, epidemiology and geography, as models for both latent and observed variables. In the latter case, the most common inferential method has been...

This work describes a Gaussian Markov random field model that includes several previously proposed models, and studies properties of their maximum likelihood (ML) and restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimators in a special case. Specifically, for models where a particular relation holds...