Abstract

CELEMIN, Juan Pablo. Spatial Autocorrelation and Local Indicators of Spatial Association: Importance, Structure and Application. Rev. Univ. geogr. [online]. 2009, vol.18, n.1, pp. 11-31. ISSN 1852-4265.

Spatial autocorrelation is an inherently geographical statistical procedure that can tell much about the behavior of the geo-information at different scales, in particular the type of association among neighboring spatial units. However, despite its growing importance within the framework of exploratory analysis of spatial data, its use is limited in the geographical analyses that continue to use traditional correlation coefficients and descriptive statistics. In this sense, this methodological study aims at highlighting the usefulness of this procedure, by giving a thorough detail of its structure and functioning by means of an example applied to the departments of Santa Cruz Province. Specifically, this work focuses on the analysis of local indicators of spatial association (LISA) which breaks down the global index of autocorrelation and identifies how each spatial unit contributes to the formation of the global value thus allowing to capture, at the same time, the degree of spatial association and heterogeneity resulting from the contribution of each spatial unit.

Keywords : Spatial autocorrelation; Local indicators of spatial association (LISA); Statistics.