“…Although different forms of can be considered depending on the application, sparse forms provide computationally reasonable choices, with the diagonal structure being the most commonly used (Basu and Michailidis, 2015; Hu et al ., 2017; Lin and Michailidis, 2017). In particular, choosing , with a scalar and the identity matrix, corresponds to the case where the cross‐covariance between two observation points ( i and j ) at times and is a fraction () of the covariance between those two points at time (i.e., ).…”