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Geospatial Analysis Requires a Different Way of Thinking: The Problem of Spatial Heterogeneity
University of Gävle, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Department of Computer and Geospatial Sciences, Geospatial Sciences. Univ Gavle, Fac Engn & Sustainable Dev, Div GISci, SE-80176 Gavle, Sweden..ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2337-2486
2018 (English)In: TRENDS IN SPATIAL ANALYSIS AND MODELLING: DECISION-SUPPORT AND PLANNING STRATEGIES / [ed] Behnisch, M Meinel, G, SPRINGER , 2018, Vol. 19, p. 23-40Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Geospatial analysis is very much dominated by a Gaussian way of thinking, which assumes that things in the world can be characterized by a well-defined mean, i.e., things are more or less similar in size. However, this assumption is not always valid. In fact, many things in the world lack a well-defined mean, and therefore there are far more small things than large ones. This paper attempts to argue that geospatial analysis requires a different way of thinking - a Paretian way of thinking that underlies skewed distribution such as power laws, Pareto and lognormal distributions. I review two properties of spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity, and point out that the notion of spatial heterogeneity in current spatial statistics is only used to characterize local variance of spatial dependence or regression. I subsequently argue for a broad perspective on spatial heterogeneity, and suggest it be formulated as a scaling law. I further discuss the implications of Paretian thinking and the scaling law for better understanding geographic forms and processes, in particular while facing massive amounts of social media data. In the spirit of Paretian thinking, geospatial analysis should seek to simulate geographic events and phenomena from the bottom up rather than correlations as guided by Gaussian thinking.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
SPRINGER , 2018. Vol. 19, p. 23-40
Keywords [en]
Big data, Scaling of geographic space, Head/tail breaks, Power laws, Heavy-tailed distributions
National Category
Civil Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-33455DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-52522-8_2ISI: 000550279500002ISBN: 978-3-319-52522-8 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hig-33455DiVA, id: diva2:1464039
Conference
1st International Land Use Symposium (ILUS) - Trends in Spatial Analysis and Modelling of Settlements and Infrastructure, Dresden 2015
Available from: 2020-09-03 Created: 2020-09-03 Last updated: 2020-09-03Bibliographically approved

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Jiang, Bin

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
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Language
  • sv-SE
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  • de-DE
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