ai-geostats  

RE: AI-GEOSTATS: "Naive" question on lat-long conventions

Munroe, Darla K
Thu, 15 Apr 2004 09:17:33 -0700

Hello,

>From experience, I am somewhat suspicious of the Delaunay triangulation
routine in the Matlab Spatial Econometrics Toolbox.  I'm tried to replicate
matrices that I calculated with the simplest of datasets (i.e., a raster
grid), and not gotten the same results.  If you are using Matlab to do your
modeling, it's definitely the best that's out there, but there are some
other tools available.

In particular, there is Luc Anselin's GeoDa package, which is free.  It's
still in beta format, but the final release will be sometime this fall.
It's really a wonderful package for all sorts of data exploration and
spatial data exploration.  It can handle tens of thousands of obs (which
SpaceStat couldn't), and it can create all sorts of weights matrix, as well
as estimate a couple spatial regression models:

http://sal.agecon.uiuc.edu/geoda_main.php

- DM
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Coleman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 9:42 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: AI-GEOSTATS: "Naive" question on lat-long conventions


Greetings,

I apologize in advance for what must be a rather naive question, but I 
am new to the field of spatial statistics. In the course of learning 
and testing various estimation methods with test data sets, I have a 
couple of questions regarding conventions regarding lat-long 
coordinates. In particular, I have been using a small test data set 
provided by Anselin on crime data in Columbus OH. Each sample point 
includes a lat-long coordinate. The data set can be found at 
http://www.spatial-econometrics.com/data/

As an example, the first point in this data set shows latitude=35.62, 
longitude=42.38. Yet when I check the coordinates of  a random point in 
Columbus OH (not in the dataset), I find coordinates in the range of 
Lat=40.x, Long= -82.y. I use the points in the Anselin data set to 
calculate a spatial distance matrix using Delaunay Triangulization. I 
wanted to be sure that I understand what the conventions are when 
encoding lat-long coordinates. In the end, I need to understand this so 
I can calculate the distance between two points based on their lat-long 
coordinates.

Thanks,

Mark


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