Sorry for the confusion. I talked about points and cells because I've been trying both feature and raster-based approaches. Let me try to be more clear.
I have a set of 104 places in the US, with coordinates, from which a biological virus sample was obtained. We know how the virus moved across the US from evolutionary analyses. Now I want to compare this 'known' path of movement (which has direction and speed) to the 'possible' or 'probable' paths of movement based on factors like elevation.
In the past, I have done such an analysis by comparing a pairwise matrix with 104*103/2 entries of genetic distance vs. a pairwise matrix of geographic distance. Now, I would like to expand the geographic matrix to a cost matrix that accounts for different variables I would like to test.
Basically my question is, how to obtain such a pairwise matrix of cost distances? I have produced my cost surfaces in ArcGIS, which are raster files with cell sizes of 0.1. I transformed the original shape file that contained my 104 points to a raster file also with cell sizes of 0.1 (note that because some of the points fall in the same cell, I now have 68 rows in my Attribute table). What I would like is to know the cost of traveling from each of the 68 cells to the other 67, using different cost surfaces (one for elevation, one for distance to rivers,etc).
I am quite new to GIS and so any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
