Lecture 12 5 22
Lecture 12 5 22
Visualization: look for patterns in geographic and feature space; these suggest
possible analyses.
Is there a trend in the attributes with geographic position? E.g. rainfall decreasing away from an
ocean
Is there local spatial dependence, i.e. values of points or polygons close by are
more similar than those further apart?
Is there a spatial pattern to the sample points?
Computation: large numerical systems (e.g. the kriging system) that are
practically impossible to solve by hand if there are more than a few points.
Spatial data
• Spatial data often have spatial relationships due to soil, topology or
management practices. Samples taken near each other are more
likely to be similar than samples far apart.
IDW
Polynomial
interpolation
Inverse Distance Interpolation
• To account for the distance relationship, the values of closer points are
usually weighted more heavily than those farther away
{z (i) : i D}
Important geo-statistics packages
• The gstat package provides a wide range of functions for univariate and
multivariate geo-statistics.
• The geoR and geoRglm packages contain functions for model-based geo-
statistics.
Stationarity and isotropy
• Autocorrelation assumes stationarity, meaning that the structure of the variable is
consistent over the entire study area.
• Autocorrelation assumes isotropy, meaning the variable does not exhibits a
direction-dependent trend over the study area.
• In case of non-stationarity, there are large trends in the data. In such cases the
data are detrended first.
• Data are detrended by fitting a regression equation.
• After detrending use only the residuals for autocorrelation analysis.
• In case of anisotropy, we use directional variogram.
Anisotropy : examples
• The variogram measures dissimilarity as a function of separation distance and
direction. It is possible for a variable of interest to change more rapidly in one
direction than in another. For example:
• the distribution of grain size changes more rapidly in a direction perpendicular to
the shoreline than it does parallel to the shore line.
• The prevalence of a certain species of plants changes more rapidly in an arid
climate as one moves in a direction perpendicular to a river than it does as one
moves along the river.
• Variogram is calculated for all pairs of points in all directions to check for
anisotropy.
Geostatistical estimation
• Isotropy:
Trend is a function of distance from a known (sampled) point only
• Anisotropy
Trend is a function of both distance and direction from a known point
Geostatistical estimation
Therefore we begin with inspecting the data for normality and for any spatial
trend by:
• plotting the data (for spatial trend)
• histogram for normality.
In case of non-normality, we use data transformation methods e.g logarithmic
transformation
Spatial covariance and correlation
• Covariance and correlation are measures of similarity between two different
variables
i
(y
i 1
y) 2
i
(x
i 1
x) 2
n n
n n n n
n n
N w ij (x i x)(x j x)
i 1 j1
w
i 1 j1
ij (x i x)(x j x)/ w ij
i 1 j1
n n n
( w ij ) (x i x) 2
= n n
i
(x x) 2
i
(x x) 2
i 1 j1 i 1
Spatial i 1 i 1
auto-correlation n n
Briggs UT-Dallas GISC 6382 Spring 2007