Spatial hotspot detection in the presence of global spatial autocorrelation

Abstract The presence of global spatial autocorrelation usually leads to the spurious identification of spatial hotspots and hinders the identification of local hotspots. Despite the use of statistical methods to address global spatial autocorrelation in spatial hotspot detection, accurately modeling global spatial autocorrelation structure without the stationarity assumption of spatial processes is difficult. To overcome this challenge, we fitted the global spatial autocorrelation structure from a geometric perspective and identified the optimal global spatial autocorrelation structure by analyzing the variances in spatial data. Hotspots were detected from the residuals obtained by removing the global spatial autocorrelation structure from the original dataset. We upgraded a weighted moving average method based on binomial coefficients (Yang Chizhong filtering) to fit the global spatial autocorrelation structure for field-like geographic phenomena. A variance decay indicator, based on the variance in the original and filtered data, was used to identify the optimal global spatial autocorrelation structure. Yang Chizhong filtering does not require a spatial stationarity assumption and can preserve local autocorrelation structures in the residuals as much as possible. Experimental results showed that hotspot detection methods combined with Yang Chizhong filtering can effectively reduce type-I and -II errors in the results and discover implicit and valuable urban hotspots.