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13
Spatial Auto-Correlation
and Auto-Regression
13.1 LATTICE DATA: SPATIAL AUTO-CORRELATION
ANDAUTO-REGRESSION
Lattice spatial data are such that the spatial domain is divided into regions and the observations or
variable values are associated with regions. There are two types of lattice data: regular, e.g., grid or
raster, and irregular, e.g., polygons. Variables have a unique value for an entire region. The regions
have a neighborhood structure given by distances between centroids or by the amount of shared
borders.
One important analysis method of lattice data is spatial auto-correlation. Its objective is to
detect spatial patterns ba