Organization of the Lesson

Thus, this Lesson is organized into two Units:

• In the first Unit, one will be interested in methods allowing to describe the spatial structure present in the distribution of properties of a phenomenon. The description of this organization will be carried out by measuring the spatial dependency. This process is similar to that used for continuous spatial distributions (see Lesson Continous spatial variables of the module B-AN), but the developed indices of spatial dependency are adapted to the discontinuous aspect of the distributions considered.
• In the second Unit, we will approach methods of description of the spatial organization through concept of spatial arrangement. One will consider successively this arrangement at the global scale of the study area, then on a local scale of the neighborhood of the spatial entities. These descriptors supplement those presented in Units 2, 3 and 4 of Lesson 2 in the basic module in spatial analysis (B-AN). This concept of arrangement being particularly dense, it is necessary to control the significance of a great number of descriptors to try to account for the complexity of spatial arrangement, through its structure and of its texture.

Far from being exhaustive, this whole of methods constitutes a set of powerful tools to try to answer certain aspects of the fundamental interrogation on the spatial organization of the properties of discontinuous phenomena.