An Open Source Toolkit for Identifying Comparative Space-time Research Questions

Comparative space-time thinking lies at the heart of spatiotemporally integrated social sciences. The multiple dimensions and scales of socioeconomic dynamics pose numerous challenges for the application and evaluation of public policies in the comparative context. At the same time, social scientists have been slow to adopt and implement new spatiotemporally explicit methods of data analysis due to the lack of extensible software packages, which becomes a major impediment to the promotion of spatiotemporal thinking. The proposed framework will address this need by developing a set of research questions based on space-time-distributional features of socioeconomic datasets. The authors aim to develop, evaluate, and implement this framework in an open source toolkit to comprehensively quantify the changes and level of hidden variation of space-time datasets across scales and dimensions. Free access to the source code allows a broader community to incorporate additional advances in perspectives and methods, thus facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration. Being written in Python, it is entirely cross-platform, lowering transmission costs in research and education.

Knox时空交互检验空间阈值确定方法

Knox检验是一种常用的城市犯罪时空交互模式分析方法,但其阈值需要人为指定,这种主观的阈值确定方法存在一定随意性,因此需探索更为合理的阈值确定方法。提出利用点对平均最邻近距离作为Knox检验空间阈值的确定方法,并通过城市入室盗窃、盗窃电动车和扒窃3类事件进行实验验证。结果表明,与常见的几种阈值确定方法相比,所提方法检测出了最大数量的显著性交互事件对数,能更加充分地了解事件的真实时空交互模式,为基于Knox检验的事件时空聚集模式分析提供了一种有效的空间阈值确定手段。