查看文章

One of the recent major trends in spatial analysis is local modelling by which spatial analysts examine local properties in geographical phenomena (Fotheringham, 1997). Indeed, spatial processes tend to vary over space due to different geographical contexts so that spatial non-stationarity emerges (Jones III and Hanham, 1995). In such cases, global models that postulate universally acceptable properties fail to capture the real phenomena under study. We could say that inferences of local incidence rates in disease mapping are the simplest form of local modelling (Openshaw et al, 1987; Nakaya, 2000). As for more complicated association analyses, Casetti (1972)'s expansion method is popular to model explicitly the property of non-stationarity in regres-sion analysis (eg, Casetti, 1990). According to the method, we can specify geographical drifts of regression parameters by polynomial or harmonic expansion …