AM-43 - Location and Service Area Problems
Many facilities exist to provide essential services in a city or region. The service area of a facility refers to a geographical area where the intended service of the facility can be received effectively. Service area delineation varies with the particular service a facility provides. This topic examines two types of service areas, one that can be defined based on a predetermined range such as travel distance/time and another based on the nearest facility available. Relevant location models are introduced to identify the best location(s) of one or multiple facilities to maximize service provision or minimize the system-wide cost. The delineation of service areas and structuring of a location model draw extensively on existing functions in a GIS. The topic represents an important area of GIS&T.
AM-23 - Local Measures of Spatial Association
Local measures of spatial association are statistics used to detect variations of a variable of interest across space when the spatial relationship of the variable is not constant across the study region, known as spatial non-stationarity or spatial heterogeneity. Unlike global measures that summarize the overall spatial autocorrelation of the study area in one single value, local measures of spatial association identify local clusters (observations nearby have similar attribute values) or spatial outliers (observations nearby have different attribute values). Like global measures, local indicators of spatial association (LISA), including local Moran’s I and local Geary’s C, incorporate both spatial proximity and attribute similarity. Getis-Ord Gi*, another popular local statistic, identifies spatial clusters at various significance levels, known as hot spots (unusually high values) and cold spots (unusually low values). This so-called “hot spot analysis” has been extended to examine spatiotemporal trends in data. Bivariate local Moran’s I describes the statistical relationship between one variable at a location and a spatially lagged second variable at neighboring locations, and geographically weighted regression (GWR) allows regression coefficients to vary at each observation location. Visualization of local measures of spatial association is critical, allowing researchers of various disciplines to easily identify local pockets of interest for future examination.