Compute the empirical semivariogram

Compute the empirical semivariogram for varying bin sizes and cutoff values.

Torgegram(
  formula,
  ssn.object,
  type = c("flowcon", "flowuncon"),
  bins = 15,
  cutoff,
  partition_factor
)

Arguments

formula: A formula describing the fixed effect structure.
ssn.object: A spatial stream network object with class SSN.
type: The Torgegram type. A vector with possible values "flowcon" for flow-connected distances, "flowuncon" for flow-unconnected distances, and "euclid" for Euclidean distances. The default is to show both flow-connected and flow-unconnected distances.
bins: The number of equally spaced bins. The default is 15.
cutoff: The maximum distance considered. The default is half the diagonal of the bounding box from the coordinates.
partition_factor: An optional formula specifying the partition factor. If specified, semivariances are only computed for observations sharing the same level of the partition factor.

Value

A list with elements correspond to type. Each element is data frame with distance bins (bins), the average distance (dist), the semivariance (gamma), and the number of (unique) pairs (np) for the respective type.

Details

The Torgegram is an empirical semivariogram is a tool used to visualize and model spatial dependence by estimating the semivariance of a process at varying distances separately for flow-connected, flow-unconnected, and Euclidean distances. For a constant-mean process, the semivariance at distance \(h\) is denoted \(\gamma(h)\) and defined as \(0.5 * Var(z1 - z2)\). Under second-order stationarity, \(\gamma(h) = Cov(0) - Cov(h)\), where \(Cov(h)\) is the covariance function at distance h. Typically the residuals from an ordinary least squares fit defined by formula are second-order stationary with mean zero. These residuals are used to compute the empirical semivariogram. At a distance h, the empirical semivariance is \(1/N(h) \sum (r1 - r2)^2\), where \(N(h)\) is the number of (unique) pairs in the set of observations whose distance separation is h and r1 and r2 are residuals corresponding to observations whose distance separation is h. In spmodel, these distance bins actually contain observations whose distance separation is h +- c, where c is a constant determined implicitly by bins. Typically, only observations whose distance separation is below some cutoff are used to compute the empirical semivariogram (this cutoff is determined by cutoff).

References

Zimmerman, D. L., & Ver Hoef, J. M. (2017). The Torgegram for fluvial variography: characterizing spatial dependence on stream networks. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 26(2), 253--264.

Examples

# Copy the mf04p .ssn data to a local directory and read it into R
# When modeling with your .ssn object, you will load it using the relevant
# path to the .ssn data on your machine
copy_lsn_to_temp()
temp_path <- paste0(tempdir(), "/MiddleFork04.ssn")
mf04p <- ssn_import(temp_path, overwrite = TRUE)

tg <- Torgegram(Summer_mn ~ 1, mf04p)
plot(tg)