ESDA Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis

Exploratory Analysis of the Camden borough in London for selected population variables

Column

Global Spatial Autocorrelation

Column

Before modelling dependency, let’s check how Qualification and White-British are spatially connected using Rook’s case neighbours for the Global Moran’s test. A rule of thumb is a spatial autocorrelation higher than 0.3 and lower than -0.3 is meaningful


    Moran I test under randomisation

data:  OA.Census$Qualification  
weights: listw    

Moran I statistic standard deviate = 24.292, p-value
< 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: greater
sample estimates:
Moran I statistic       Expectation          Variance 
     0.5448699398     -0.0013368984      0.0005055733


    Moran I test under randomisation

data:  OA.Census$White_British  
weights: listw    

Moran I statistic standard deviate = 24.157, p-value
< 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: greater
sample estimates:
Moran I statistic       Expectation          Variance 
     0.5416482143     -0.0013368984      0.0005052236

The Moran I statistic is 0.54, so our Qualification variable is positively autocorrelated in Camden. The same goes for the White-British variable, with a statistic equal to 0.542. In other words, the data does spatially cluster for these two variables. The p-value is also a measure of the statistical significance of the model.

Local Spatial Autocorrelation I

Moran Scatterplot

The maps showed that both Qualification and White-British rates appear to be clustered in Camden. To explore this fact further, a Moran scatterplot can be used. And, as expected, both scatterplots show a fairly strong positive association.

Column

Local Spatial Autocorrelation II

Given that, from the map, it is possible to observe the variations in autocorrelation across space and the test for spatial autocorrelation is fairly strong, let’s plot the p-values to observe variances in significance across Camden.

It is apparent that there is a statistically significant geographic pattern to the clustering of both our qualification and the White-British variables in Camden.