In today’s class, we talked about the concepts of point patterns and point processes in the study of spatial data.
Point Patterns:
Refers to a set of points that are distributed within a given space. It’s an observed dataset of points in a space. They are classified into the following main types:
1) Poisson Patterns:
Points are distributed independently and uniformly across the space
2) Clustered Patterns:
Points tend to group together due to some underlying attraction or shared factors
Point Processes:
A point process is a mathematical model that describes the random occurrence of points in space and/or time. It’s a probabilistic model that describes how such point patterns could be generated.
We also discussed an insight that we’d like to deep dive into regarding the armed conflict location and event data. The thought was that we pick a location where we’d like to predict a violent political demonstration in a given space and time from previous years. And by looking at this location’s nearest neighbors and their past data, we predict the probability of a violent political demonstration here in future.