Local Entropy Map for Spatial Analysis

Guo, D (2010). "Local Entropy Map: A Non-Parametric Approach to Discover Spatially Varying Multiivariate Relationships". International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 24 (9), pages 1367-1389. (Download paper journal web site). You may also download related software and data. 

This research proposes a nonparametric approach, a local entropy map, which does not assume a prior relationship form and can detect the existence of multivariate relationships regardless of their forms. The local entropy map calculates an approximation of the Rényi entropy for the multivariate data in each local region (in the geographic space). Each local entropy value is then converted to a p-value by comparing to a distribution of permutation entropy values for the same region. All p-values (one for each local region) are processed by several statistical tests to control the multiple-testing problem.