Spatial Statistics

Spatial versus non-spatial data analysis

• Spatial data analysis is involved when the data are spatially located
and explicit consideration is given to possible importance of their
spatial agreement.
 Spatial Statistics
Spatial statistics deals with ways of analyzing all varieties of data in a
spatial context to:

• Increase our understanding of the spatial process

• To predict values in areas where observations have not been made
 Methods for Spatial data
• Discrete point data : Point pattern Statistics
• Continuous point data: Geo-statistics
• Line data: Network Analysis
• Areal data: Lattice
Geo-Statistics
 Important Geostatistics packages

• gstat package
• The geoR and geoRglm packages contain functions for model-based
geo-statistics
 What is “geostatistics”?

• What is “statistics”?

• What then is “geo”-statistics?

 Statistics
• Descriptive vs. Inferential

• Population vs. Sample

 Population vs. Sample
• Population: a set of well defined objects
Geographic example: a population of all pixels in a multi-spectral satellite image

• Sample: is a subset of a population

Could be a set of pixels from known ground truth points

• Sampling: the process of selecting a sample from a population

 Statistics
• Descriptive statistics: summaries of samples

• Inferential statistics: drawing inference about population using sample

information
Observations > unobserved events

• In statistical inference we quantify the degree of probability that our inference is true.

• The most common example of geo-statistical inference is the prediction of some attribute at an un-
sampled point, based on some set of sampled points.
 Spatial covariance and correlation
• Covariance and correlation are measures of similarity between two different
variables

• Magnitude of covariance increases with increasing similarity in the pattern of

variation of the two variables about their respective means.
• Correlation coefficient ranges between -1 to +1 and 0 for uncorrelated variables.
Covariance
 Covariance vs Correlation
Covariance: Direction of linear relation between two variables
Correlation: Direction and strength of a relationship between
two, numerically measured, continuous variables.
• The correlation values have standardized notions, whereas
the covariance values are not standardized and cannot be
used to compare how strong or weak the relationship is
because the magnitude has no direct significance.
• To determine whether the covariance of the two variables is
large or small, we need to assess it relative to the standard
deviations of the two variables. 
• To do so we have to normalize the covariance by dividing it
with the product of the standard deviations of the two
variables, thus providing a correlation between the two
variables.
Correlation
 Spatial autocorrelation
• The variability of a variable with itself through space.
• To understand the measurement of spatial similarity consider a scatterplot
where the data pairs represent measurements of the “same” variable made
some distance apart from each other.
• The separation distance is called “lag”.
• Because of usually irregular distribution of our data points we usually do
not expect to find many data pairs separated by exactly the same distance
as the used lag.