On the similarity analysis of spatial patterns

The evaluation of the spatial similarity of two observed point patterns is an important issue in spatial data quality assessment. In this work we propose a formal procedure that takes advantage of the joint use of space-filling curves and the multinomial model in order to establish a statistical test to compare spatial point patterns. In this mix, the space-filling curves offer a mechanism to order the 2D, 3D or n-D space and the multinomial distribution the statistical approach for testing homogeneity. A simulation method is proposed in order to analyze the applied performance of this idea.