Geostatistics & Open-source statistical computing

Distance education course

UT/ITC offers a distance education course (1/2 time, six weeks) on the above topic, in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 ...(?). I am the principal teacher and developer of the material.

The January-March 2013 offering is described in the ITC on-line course catalogue, entry Distance course in Geostatistics and Open-Source Statistical Computing.

Topics include introduction to R, visualization of spatial data, exploring spatial structure (trend surfaces, variograms, variogram maps), interpolation, optimal interpolation (kriging), block kriging, universal kriging, kriging with external drift, indicator kriging, sequential simulation of spatial fields, sampling optimization including simulated annealing, introduction to point-patterns, introduction to areal data. The main computing tool is the gstat package of the R environment; however many other packages are used (MASS, spdep, spatstat, ...).

Course materials

These materials are from the course offered in 2012.

If you want the answers to the end-of-lesson tests, if you want personal guidance, or if you want to do a supervised individual project, you should sign up for the course.

The materials are offered here as-is, with no support. I hope you find them interesting and useful.

1. Course information (objectives, schedule, required background ...)
2. Overheads (Zip file of 9 PDF, 5.1 Mb)
3. Exercises using R (Zip file of 18 PDF, 12.5 Mb)
4. Datasets for exercises
   • Jura dataset (text file)
   • TCP Cameroon dataset (R data set)
5. R code for exercises (Zip file of 32 R scripts, 57 Kb)

Supplementary material

• E{Z}-Kriging, a DOS program to understand how ordinary kriging works (Dennis Walvoort)
• CRAN task view: Analysis of Spatial Data
• Book: Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R; Part of the UseR! series from Springer; by Bivand, Pebesma, and Gómez-Rubio
  • book from Springer
  • website from authors (datasets, figures)
• Much more on the R environment
• Technical notes: R applications relevant to ITC

  Comprehensive data analysis of a multivariate soils dataset, tutorial analysis of the Mercer-Hall wheat yield dataset, co-kriging using gstat, accuracy assesment of thematic maps, analyzing land cover change with logistic regression, optimal partitioning of soil transects, fitting rational functions to time series