Spatial Stats

[ThomasMuedi]

Hi

I am using ArcGIS 9.3.I just want to find out if spatial stats can help me to determine the clustering of the polyline,points and crosscutting of the lines.I have been trying to do that but it always tells me that i should generate spatial matrix file,something that i dont even know what relation it have with clustering or dispersed.

regards
thomas

[LaurenRosenshein]

Hi Thomas,

You can definitely use the Spatial Statistics tools to evaluate how clustered or dispersed the distribution of your data is, or the distribution of values associated with your data, whether it's points, lines, or polygons.  There are quite a few different tools you can use to do that type of analysis, all depending on the question that you are asking or the problem that you're trying to solve.  Some tools that you might want to look into are the Average Nearest Neighbor tool, the Ripley's K Function tool, or the Spatial Autocorrelation tool, to name a few.  You might also want to see the general descriptions of all of the tools for measuring global clustering (Analyzing Patterns) and local clustering (Mapping Clusters).  Hopefully these resources will help you get started.  You can also check out some additional tutorials, videos, and web seminars about the Spatial Statistics tools here:  http://esriurl.com/spatialstats.

Also, just so you know, several of the tools in the Spatial Statistics toolbox do optionally take a Spatial Weights Matrix as an input.  The Spatial Weights Matrix helps you define, ahead of time, how features are related in space.