The analysis of socio-economic data often implies the combination of data bases
originating from different administrative sources so that data have been collected
on several separate partitions of the zone of interest into administrative units. It
is therefore necessary to reallocate the data from the source spatial units to the
target spatial units. We propose a review of the literature on statistical methods of
spatial reallocation rules (spatial interpolation). Indeed one can distinguish several
types of reallocation depending on whether the initial data and the final output
are areal data or point data. We concentrate here on the areal-to-areal change of
support case when initial and final data have an areal support with a particular
attention to disaggregation for continuous data. There are three main types of
such techniques: proportional weighting schemes also called dasymetric methods,
smoothing techniques and regression based interpolation
