A kriging based practical approach for areal interpolation

Abstract

Spatial unit convergence, called areal interpolation, is often applied to address this problem. Of the many areal interpolation methods that have been proposed, a few consider spatial autocorrelation which is the general property of spatial data. Here, a new areal interpolation method that considers spatial autocorrelation is constructed by combining linear regression based areal interpolation method and kriging: a spatial statistical method. The proposed method, whose implementation and extension is easy, is practical among spatial statistics based areal interpolation methods. Then, a case study showed that the suggested method succeeds in improving the predictive accuracy and indicated that considering spatial autocorrelation is important for accurate areal interpolation.