A Statistical Toolbox For Mining And Modeling Spatial Data

Most data mining projects in spatial economics start with an evaluation of a set of attribute variables on a sample of spatial entities, looking for the existence and strength of spatial autocorrelation, based on the Moran’s and the Geary’s coefficients, the adequacy of which is rarely challenged, despite the fact that when reporting on their properties, many users seem likely to make mistakes and to foster confusion. My paper begins by a critical appraisal of the classical definition and rational of these indices. I argue that while intuitively founded, they are plagued by an inconsistency in their conception. Then, I propose a principled small change leading to corrected spatial autocorrelation coefficients, which strongly simplifies their relationship, and opens the way to an augmented toolbox of statistical methods of dimension reduction and data visualization, also useful for modeling purposes. A second section presents a formal framework, adapted from recent work in statistical learning, which gives theoretical support to our definition of corrected spatial autocorrelation coefficients. More specifically, the multivariate data mining methods presented here, are easily implementable on the existing (free) software, yield methods useful to exploit the proposed corrections in spatial data analysis practice, and, from a mathematical point of view, whose asymptotic behavior, already studied in a series of papers by Belkin & Niyogi, suggests that they own qualities of robustness and a limited sensitivity to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP), valuable in exploratory spatial data analysis

Hyperbolic topology and bounded locally homeomorphic quasiregular mappings in 3-space

We use our new type of bounded locally homeomorphic quasiregular mappings in the unit 3-ball to address long standing problems for such mappings. The construction of such mappings comes from our construction of non-trivial compact 4-dimensional cobordisms $M$ with symmetric boundary components and whose interiors have complete 4-dimensional real hyperbolic structures. Such bounded locally homeomorphic quasiregular mappings are defined in the unit 3-ball $B^3\subset \mathbb{R}^3$ as mappings equivariant with the standard conformal action of uniform hyperbolic lattices $\Gamma\subset \operatorname{Isom} H^3$ in the unit 3-ball and with its discrete representation $G=\rho(\Gamma)\subset \operatorname{Isom} H^4$. Here $G$ is the fundamental group of our non-trivial hyperbolic 4-cobordism $M=(H^4\cup\Omega(G))/G$ and the kernel of the homomorphism $\rho\!:\! \Gamma\rightarrow G$ is a free group $F_3$ on three generators.Comment: Clarification of the previous submission. 13 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.08951, arXiv:1611.0043

Metric combinatorics of convex polyhedra: cut loci and nonoverlapping unfoldings

This paper is a study of the interaction between the combinatorics of boundaries of convex polytopes in arbitrary dimension and their metric geometry. Let S be the boundary of a convex polytope of dimension d+1, or more generally let S be a `convex polyhedral pseudomanifold'. We prove that S has a polyhedral nonoverlapping unfolding into R^d, so the metric space S is obtained from a closed (usually nonconvex) polyhedral ball in R^d by identifying pairs of boundary faces isometrically. Our existence proof exploits geodesic flow away from a source point v in S, which is the exponential map to S from the tangent space at v. We characterize the `cut locus' (the closure of the set of points in S with more than one shortest path to v) as a polyhedral complex in terms of Voronoi diagrams on facets. Analyzing infinitesimal expansion of the wavefront consisting of points at constant distance from v on S produces an algorithmic method for constructing Voronoi diagrams in each facet, and hence the unfolding of S. The algorithm, for which we provide pseudocode, solves the discrete geodesic problem. Its main construction generalizes the source unfolding for boundaries of 3-polytopes into R^2. We present conjectures concerning the number of shortest paths on the boundaries of convex polyhedra, and concerning continuous unfolding of convex polyhedra. We also comment on the intrinsic non-polynomial complexity of nonconvex polyhedral manifolds.Comment: 47 pages; 21 PostScript (.eps) figures, most in colo