Measures of Spatial Dispersion
Dispersion captures the degree to which points in a point set are separated from each other. For most applications, spatial dispersion should be quantified in a way that is invariant to rotations and reflections. Several simple measures of spatial dispersion for a point set can be defined using the covariance matrix of the coordinates of the points. The trace, the determinant, and the largest eigenvalue of the covariance matrix can be used as measures of spatial dispersion.
A measure of spatial dispersion that is not based on the covariance matrix is the average distance between nearest neighbors.
Read more about this topic: Spatial Descriptive Statistics
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