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A distance correlation index of spatial dependence for compositional data
Author(s) -
Andreano M. Simona,
Benedetti Roberto,
Piersimoni Federica
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
papers in regional science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.937
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1435-5957
pISSN - 1056-8190
DOI - 10.1111/pirs.12451
Subject(s) - index (typography) , spatial correlation , spatial dependence , statistics , spatial analysis , correlation , measure (data warehouse) , econometrics , mathematics , geography , computer science , data mining , geometry , world wide web
Geographical data in economic, social or environmental sciences are usually recorded as compositions, i.e. relative frequencies, and a common inquiring problem concerns the analysis of these data over different geographical regions. In the present paper we define a new statistical test to verify spatial dependence of such geographical distributions based on distance correlation, a recently introduced measure of dependence between random vectors. The proposed index computes the non‐linear spatial distance between distributions and can be applied on compositional frequency distributions. Simulations and an application on Italian electoral data are presented, to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed test to detect spatial dependence.