Detection of Hotspots for Geospatial Lattice Data

Statistical analyses for spatial data are important features for various types of fields. Spatial data are taken at specific locations or within specific regions and their relative positions are recorded. Lattice data are synoptic observation covering an entire spatial region, like cancer rates corresponding to each county in a state. The main purpose of this paper is to detect hotspots for the region with significantly high or low rates. Kulldorff(1997) detected hotspots based on circular spatial scan statistics. We propose a new method to find any shapes of hotspots by use of echelon analysis with spatial scan statistics.