In-class Exercise 2: Emerging Hot Spot Analysis: sfdep methods

Overview

Emerging Hot Spot Analysis (EHSA) is a spatio-temporal analysis method for revealing and describing how hot spot and cold spot areas evolve over time. The analysis consist of four main steps:

  • Building a space-time cube,

  • Calculating Getis-Ord local Gi* statistic for each bin by using an FDR correction,

  • Evaluating these hot and cold spot trends by using Mann-Kendall trend test,

  • Categorising each study area location by referring to the resultant trend z-score and p-value for each location with data, and with the hot spot z-score and p-value for each bin.

Getting Started

Installing and Loading the R package

Four R packages will be used for this in-class exercise, they are: sf, sfdep, tmap, tidyverse.

pacman::p_load(sf, sfdep, tmap, plotly, tidyverse, zoo)

The Data

For the purpose of this in-class exercise, the Hunan data sets will be used, There are two data sets in thisuse case. they are:

  • Hunan, a geospatial data set in ESRI shapefile format

  • Hunan-2012, an attribute data set in csv format

Getting the Data Into R Environment

In this section, we will learn how to bring a geospatial data and its associated attribute table into R environment. The geospatial data is in ESRI shapefile format and the attribute table is in csv fomat.

hunan <- st_read(dsn = "data/geospatial", 
                 layer = "Hunan")
Reading layer `Hunan' from data source 
  `C:\cjh202311\isss624\In-class_Ex\In-class_Ex2\data\geospatial' 
  using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
Simple feature collection with 88 features and 7 fields
Geometry type: POLYGON
Dimension:     XY
Bounding box:  xmin: 108.7831 ymin: 24.6342 xmax: 114.2544 ymax: 30.12812
Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84
GDPPC <- read_csv("data/aspatial/Hunan_GDPPC.csv")
Rows: 1496 Columns: 3
── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Delimiter: ","
chr (1): County
dbl (2): Year, GDPPC

ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

Creating a Time Series Cube

Before getting started, students must read this article to learn the basic concept of spatio-temporal cube and its implementation in sfdep package.

In the code chunk below, spacetime() of sfdep is used to create an spacetime cube.

GDPPC_st <- spacetime(GDPPC, hunan,
                      .loc_col = "County",
                      .time_col = "Year")

Next, is_spacetime_cube() of sfdep package will be used to varify if GDPPC_st is indeed an space-time cube object.

is_spacetime_cube(GDPPC_st)
[1] TRUE

Computing Gi*

Next, we will compute the local Gi* statistics.

Deriving the spatial weights

The code chunk below will be used to identify neighbors and to derive an inverse distance weights.

GDPPC_nb <- GDPPC_st %>%
  activate("geometry") %>%
  mutate(nb = include_self(st_contiguity(geometry)),
         wt = st_inverse_distance(nb, geometry,
                                  scale = 1,
                                  alpha = 1),
         .before = 1) %>%
  set_nbs("nb") %>%
  set_wts("wt")
! Polygon provided. Using point on surface.
Warning: There was 1 warning in `stopifnot()`.
ℹ In argument: `wt = st_inverse_distance(nb, geometry, scale = 1, alpha = 1)`.
Caused by warning in `st_point_on_surface.sfc()`:
! st_point_on_surface may not give correct results for longitude/latitude data

Note that this dataset now has neighbors and weights for each time-slice.

head(GDPPC_nb)
spacetime ────
Context:`data`
88 locations `County`
17 time periods `Year`
── data context ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
# A tibble: 6 × 5
   Year County  GDPPC nb        wt       
  <dbl> <chr>   <dbl> <list>    <list>   
1  2005 Anxiang  8184 <int [6]> <dbl [6]>
2  2005 Hanshou  6560 <int [6]> <dbl [6]>
3  2005 Jinshi   9956 <int [5]> <dbl [5]>
4  2005 Li       8394 <int [5]> <dbl [5]>
5  2005 Linli    8850 <int [5]> <dbl [5]>
6  2005 Shimen   9244 <int [6]> <dbl [6]>

Computing Gi*

We can use these new columns to manually calculate the local Gi* for each location. We can do this bygroupingby earand using local gstarperm() fsfdep package. After which, we use unnest() tounnest gi_star column of the newly created gi_starts data,frame.

gi_stars <- GDPPC_nb %>% 
  group_by(Year) %>% 
  mutate(gi_star = local_gstar_perm(
    GDPPC, nb, wt)) %>% 
  tidyr::unnest(gi_star)

Mann-Kendall Test

With these Gi* measures we can then evaluate each location for a trend using the Mann-Kendall test. The code chunk below uses Changsha county.

cbg <- gi_stars %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  filter(County == "Changsha") |> 
  select(County, Year, gi_star)

Next, we plot the result by using ggplot2 functions.

ggplot(data = cbg, 
       aes(x = Year, 
           y = gi_star)) +
  geom_line() +
  theme_light()

We can also create an interactive plot by using ggplotly() of plotly package.

p <- ggplot(data = cbg, 
       aes(x = Year, 
           y = gi_star)) +
  geom_line() +
  theme_light()

ggplotly(p)
cbg %>%
  summarise(mk = list(
    unclass(
      Kendall::MannKendall(gi_star)))) %>% 
  tidyr::unnest_wider(mk)
# A tibble: 1 × 5
    tau      sl     S     D  varS
  <dbl>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 0.485 0.00742    66  136.  589.

In the above result, sl is the p-value. This result tells us that there is a slight upward but insignificant trend.

We can replicate this for each location by using group_by() of dplyr package.

ehsa <- gi_stars %>%
  group_by(County) %>%
  summarise(mk = list(
    unclass(
      Kendall::MannKendall(gi_star)))) %>%
  tidyr::unnest_wider(mk)

Arrange to show significant emerging hot/cold spots

emerging <- ehsa %>% 
  arrange(sl, abs(tau)) %>% 
  slice(1:5)

Performing Emerging Hotspot Analysis

Lastly, we will perform EHSA analysis by using emerging_hotspot_analysis() of sfdep package. It takes a spacetime object x (i.e. GDPPC_st), and the quoted name of the variable of interest (i.e. GDPPC) for .var argument. The k argument is used to specify the number of time lags which is set to 1 by default. Lastly, nsim map numbers of simulation to be performed.

ehsa <- emerging_hotspot_analysis(
  x = GDPPC_st, 
  .var = "GDPPC", 
  k = 1, 
  nsim = 99
)

Visualising the distribution of EHSA classes

In the code chunk below, ggplot2 functions ised used to reveal the distribution of EHSA classes as a bar chart.

ggplot(data = ehsa,
       aes(x = classification)) +
  geom_bar()

Figure above shows that sporadic cold spots class has the high numbers of county.

Visualising EHSA

In this section, you will learn how to visualise the geographic distribution EHSA classes. However, before we can do so, we need to join both hunan and ehsa together by using the code chunk below.

hunan_ehsa <- hunan %>%
  left_join(ehsa,
            by = join_by(County == location))

Next, tmap functions will be used to plot a categorical choropleth map by using the code chunk below.

ehsa_sig <- hunan_ehsa  %>%
  filter(p_value < 0.05)
tmap_mode("plot")
tmap mode set to plotting
tm_shape(hunan_ehsa) +
  tm_polygons() +
  tm_borders(alpha = 0.5) +
tm_shape(ehsa_sig) +
  tm_fill("classification") + 
  tm_borders(alpha = 0.4)
Warning: One tm layer group has duplicated layer types, which are omitted. To
draw multiple layers of the same type, use multiple layer groups (i.e. specify
tm_shape prior to each of them).