Marine research survey data on fish stocks often show a small proportion of very high-density values, as for many environmental data. This makes the estimation of second-order statistics, such as the variance and the variogram, non-robust. The high fish density values are generated by fish aggregative behaviour, which may vary greatly at small scale in time and space. The high values are thus imprecisely known, both in their spatial occurrence and order of magnitude. To map such data, three indicator-based geostatistical methods were considered, the top-cut model, min–max autocorrelation factors (MAF) of indicators, and multiple indicator kriging. In the top-cut and MAF approaches, the variable is decomposed into components and the most continuous ones... |