Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2016, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (2): 233-240.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2016.20140605

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A Permutation Test for Identifying Significant Clusters in Spatial Dataset

TANG Jianbo, LIU Qiliang, DENG Min, HUANG Jincai, CAI Jiannan   

  1. School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
  • Received:2014-11-19 Revised:2015-04-20 Online:2016-02-20 Published:2016-02-29
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos.41471385;41171351);Open Research Fund Program of Key Laboratory of Digital Mapping and Land Information Application Engineering, NASG(No.GCWD201401);Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Central South University(No.2013zzts247)

Abstract: Spatial hierarchical clustering methods considering both spatial proximity and attribute similarity play an important role in exploratory spatial data analysis. Although existing methods are able to detect multi-scale homogeneous spatial contiguous clusters, the significance of these clusters cannot be evaluated in an objective way. In this study, a permutation test was developed to determine the significance of clusters discovered by spatial hierarchical clustering methods. Experiments on both simulated and meteorological datasets show that the proposed permutation test is effective for determining significant clustering structures from spatial datasets.

Key words: spatial hierarchical clustering, significance, spatial pattern, permutation test

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