EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Spatial Association from the Perspective of Mutual Information

Wen-Bin Zhang, Yong Ge, Hexiang Bai, Yan Jin, Alfred Stein and Peter M. Atkinson

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 8, 1960-1976

Abstract: Measures of spatial association are important to reveal the spatial structures and patterns in geographical phenomena. They have utility for spatial interpolation, stochastic simulation, and causal inference, among others. Such measures are abundantly available for continuous spatial variables, whereas for categorical spatial variables they are less well developed. In this research, we developed a measure of spatial association for categorical spatial variables coined the entropogram, quantifying its spatial association using mutual information. Mutual information concerns information shared by pairs of random variables at different locations as revealed by their observed joint frequency distribution and marginal frequency distributions. The developed new measure is modeled as a function of lag in analogy to the variogram. Whereas existing measures focus mainly on interstate relationships, the entropogram models the spatial correlation in categorical spatial variables holistically. In this way, the entropogram imparts multiple advantages, for example, simplifying the representation of spatial structure for categorical variables and facilitating communication. The entropogram also reflects variation in the spatial correlation between different states. We first explored the properties of the entropogram in a simulation study. Then, we applied the entropogram to analyze the spatial association of land cover types in Qinxian, Shanxi, China. We conclude that the entropogram provides a suitable addition to existing measures of spatial association for applications in a wide range of disciplines where the categorical spatial variable is of interest.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2023.2209629 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:113:y:2023:i:8:p:1960-1976

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2023.2209629

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:113:y:2023:i:8:p:1960-1976