A statistical method for determining whether the population distribution in a region is significantly affected by the accessibility to daily facilities and whether population is large at places where facilities are close by

Abstract

This paper proposes a statistical method for determining whether the population distribution in a region is significantly affected by the accessibility to daily facilities and whether population is large at places where facilities are close by. In urban planning, it has been of interest to explore the relationships between population distribution and other distributions. In particular, in recent years, increasing attention is paid to whether a population distribution is affected by the accessibility to daily facilities such as medical and commercial facilities, and also to whether people tend to live close to such facilities and therefore population density is high around the facilities. Taking into account the fact that there is generally positive spatial autocorrelation in population density, this paper proposes a statistical method for investigating these questions, and, using the method, empirically analyzes the distributions of population and supermarkets in Hirosaki-shi, Aomori.