Synonyms
Geographical analysis; Geographical data analysis; Spatial analysis
Definition
Methods of data analysis perform logical or mathematical manipulations on data in order to test hypotheses, expose anomalies or patterns, or create summaries or views that expose particular traits. Data often refer to specific locations in some space. To qualify as spatial, the locations must be known and must affect the outcome of the analysis. While many spaces might be relevant, including the space of the human brain or the space of the human genome, the history of spatial data analysis is dominated by location in geographic space, in other words location on or near the surface of the Earth. Thus, geographical and spatial are often essentially synonymous. More formally, spatial data analysis can be defined as a set of techniques devised for the manipulation of data whose outcomes are not invariant under relocation of the objects of interest in some space. The term exploratory spatial data analysis...
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Goodchild, M.F. (2018). Spatial Data Analysis. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_353
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