ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 focused on graphical means of data exploration. The methods of this chapter involve multivariate statistical analysis, and, when applied to nonspatial data sets, they are not necessarily considered exploratory. We classify these methods as exploratory here because in those cases in which a parameter may be estimated or a hypothesis may be tested, spatial data may violate the assumptions underlying these operations, and, therefore, the estimation or signi–cance test may not be valid. We do not use the methods to obtain –nal con–rmatory results (parameter estimates and/or signi–cance tests), but rather to gain further insights into the relationships among the data. Con–rmatory analysis will be carried out in later chapters in which the analysis incorporates assumptions about the spatial relationships among the data.
