Regional growth patterns in Sweden - a search for hot spots

This paper gives an exploratory description of the regional growth pattern in Sweden during the period 1981-1999. The main issue is to test the hypothesis that municipalities with higher average income growth and net migration rates are more clustered that could be caused by pure chance. The paper is purely descriptive and we make use of statistical tests for spatial clustering as well as maps to identify what we reefer to as ''regional hot spots''. Our results are however very sensitive for the specification of the weights matrix.

A spatial analysis of dietary patterns in a large representative population in the north of The Netherlands - the Lifelines cohort study

Background: Diet is an important modifiable risk factor for chronic diseases. In the search for effective strategies to improve dietary patterns in order to promote healthy ageing, new approaches considering contextual factors in public health medicine are warranted. The aim of this study is to examine the spatial clustering of dietary patterns in a large representative sample of adults. Methods: Dietary patterns were defined on the basis of a 111 item Food Frequency Questionnaire among n = 117,570 adults using principal components analysis. We quantified the spatial clustering of dietary pattern scores at the neighborhood level using the Global Moran's I spatial statistic, taking into consideration individual demographic and (neighborhood) socioeconomic indicators. Results: Four dietary patterns explaining 27% of the variance in dietary data were extracted in this population and named the "bread and cookies" pattern, the "snack" pattern, the "meat and alcohol" pattern and the "vegetable, fruit and fish" pattern. Significant spatial clustering of high (hot spot) and low (cold spot) dietary pattern scores was found for all four dietary patterns irrespective of age and gender differences. Educational attainment and neighborhood income explained the global clustering to some extent, although clustering at smaller regional scales persisted. Conclusion: The significant region-specific hot and cold spots of the four dietary patterns illustrate the existence of regional "food cultures" and underscore the need for interventions targeted at the sub-national level in order to tackle unhealthy dietary behavior and to stimulate people to make healthy dietary choices

Hot Routes: Developing a New Technique for the Spatial Analysis of Crime

The use of hotspot mapping techniques such as KDE to represent the geographical spread of linear events can be problematic. Network-constrained data (for example transport-related crime) require a different approach to visualize concentration. We propose a methodology called Hot Routes, which measures the risk distribution of crime along a linear network by calculating the rate of crimes per section of road. This method has been designed for everyday crime analysts, and requires only a Geographical Information System (GIS), and suitable data to calculate. A demonstration is provided using crime data collected from London bus routes

Tracing The Spatial Patterns Of Innovation Determinants In Regional Economic Performance

This paper investigates factors of innovation and their role in regional economic performance for a sample of 261 EU NUTS 2 regions over 2009–2012. In our study, we identify regions with spillover as well as drain effects of innovation factors on economic performance. The spatial analysis indicates that both regional innovativeness and regional development, are strongly determined by the region’s location and neighbourhood, with severe consequences for the Eastern and Central Europe. We assessed the impact of innovation factors and their spatial counterparts on economic performance by spatial Durbin panel model. The model is designed to test the existence and strength of country-effect of innovativeness on the level of regional economic status. This allows for controlling the country-specific socio-economic factors, without reducing the number of degrees of freedom. Our model shows that regions benefit economically from their locational spillovers in terms of social capital. However, the decomposition of R&D expenditures revealed competition effect between internal R&D and external technology acquisition favouring in-house research over the outsourced ones

Crime Pattern Detection Using Data Mining

Can crimes be modeled as data mining problems? We will try to answer this question in this paper. Crimes are a social nuisance and cost our society dearly in several ways. Any research that can help in solving crimes faster will pay for itself. Here we look at use of clustering algorithm for a data mining approach to help detect the crimes patterns and speed up the process of solving crime. We will look at k-means clustering with some enhancements to aid in the process of identification of crime patterns. We will apply these techniques to real crime data from a sheriff’s office and validate our results. We also use semi-supervised learning technique here for knowledge discovery from the crime records and to help increase the predictive accuracy. We also developed a weighting scheme for attributes here to deal with limitations of various out of the box clustering tools and techniques. This easy to implement machine learning framework works with the geo-spatial plot of crime and helps to improve the productivity of the detectives and other law enforcement officers. It can also be applied for counter terrorism for homeland security

All-sky Search for Time-integrated Neutrino Emission from Astrophysical Sources with 7 yr of IceCube Data

Since the recent detection of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos, the question of its origin has not yet fully been answered. Much of what is known about this flux comes from a small event sample of high neutrino purity, good energy resolution, but large angular uncertainties. In searches for point-like sources, on the other hand, the best performance is given by using large statistics and good angular reconstructions. Track-like muon events produced in neutrino interactions satisfy these requirements. We present here the results of searches for point-like sources with neutrinos using data acquired by the IceCube detector over 7 yr from 2008 to 2015. The discovery potential of the analysis in the northern sky is now significantly below = 10−12 TeV cm−2 s−1, on average 38% lower than the sensitivity of the previously published analysis of 4 yr exposure. No significant clustering of neutrinos above background expectation was observed, and implications for prominent neutrino source candidates are discussed

Spatial Patterns Associating Low Birth Weight with Environmental and Behavioral Factors

Low birth weight (LBW) is a significant public health problem in the world. It was estimated globally by the World Health Organization (WHO) that prevalence of LBW was 15% of all births. In Murung Raya district LBW cases remain high. This paper aimed to identify and discuss the relationship between environmental risk factors with LBW in Murung Raya.A spatial analysis was conducted with 150 women as the total participantswho were recruited through the incidence data in 2013-2014. The questionnaires, medical records, and geographic data were measured by Stata software, ArcGis, SatScan, and Geoda. The study results indicated there was significant correlation between health behavior and environmental variables with the strength of external neighborhood effect across LBW risk factors. More intense clustering of high values (hot spots) was found through the spatial analysis showing that most of the cases were located near the defined buffer zone. This research demonstrates that the spatial pattern analysis provided greater statistical power to detect an effect that was not apparent in the previous epidemiology studies