A Statistical Method for Analyzing the Spatial Relationship between the Distribution of Activity Points and the Distribution of Activity Continuously Distributed over a Region

This paper shows a statistical method for analyzing the spatial relationship between the distributions of two different kinds of activity in a region. One kind of activity is discretely distributed as points in a region (such as the distribution of retail stores), and the other kind of activity is continuously distributed over the region (such as the distribution of population). First, three models representing the relationship between the above two distributions are formulated. Second, statistical methods for fitting these models to data are developed and the measures of fitness are proposed. Third, using these measures, the relationship between the distributions of thirty-seven kinds of retail stores and the distribution of population is examined in a suburb of Osaka in Japan.