2. Analysis of spatial distribution

This section presents the so-called direct spatial analysis methods, which analyze the spatial distribution of objects (individuals or events) or their values directly from their geographical position. In the following paragraph, we present the so-called indirect spatial analysis methods, which use the spatial aggregation of values into geographical units.

Direct methods include :

• global analyses, which provide information on the overall spatial distribution ;

• local analyses, which provide information on local variations in the overall spatial distribution ;

• detection of places in the space that have a special character;

• estimation and interpolation, to characterize any point in space from a finite number of point...