spdep (version 0.1-10)

nb2listw: Spatial weights for neighbours lists

Description

The function supplements a neighbours list with spatial weights for the chosen coding scheme.

Usage

nb2listw(neighbours, glist=NULL, style="W", zero.policy=FALSE)

Arguments

neighbours

an object of class nb

glist

list of general weights corresponding to neighbours

style

style can take values W, B, C, and S

zero.policy

If FALSE stop with error for any empty neighbour sets, if TRUE permit the weights list to be formed with zero-length weights vectors

Value

• A listw object with the following members:
• style
  one of W, B, C, S as above
• neighbours
  the input neighbours list
• weights
  the weights for the neighbours and chosen style, with attributes set to report the type of relationships (binary or general, if general the form of the glist argument), and style as above

Details

Starting from a binary neighbours list, in which regions are either listed as neighbours or are absent (thus not in the set of neighbours for some definition), the function adds a weights list with values given by the coding scheme style chosen. B is the basic binary coding, W is row standardised, C is globally standardised, while S is the variance-stabilizing coding scheme proposed by Tiefelsdorf et al. 1999, p. 167-168.

If zero policy is set to TRUE, weights vectors of zero length are inserted for regions without neighbour in the neighbours list. These will in turn generate lag values of zero, equivalent to the sum of products of the zero row t(rep(0, length=length(neighbours))) %*% x, for arbitraty numerical vector x of length length(neighbours). The spatially lagged value of x for the zero-neighbour region will then be zero, which may (or may not) be a sensible choice.

References

Tiefelsdorf, M., Griffith, D. A., Boots, B. 1999 A variance-stabilizing coding scheme for spatial link matrices, Environment and Planning A, 31, pp. 165-180.

See Also

summary.nb, read.gal

Examples

data(columbus)
cards <- card(col.gal.nb)
col.w <- nb2listw(col.gal.nb)
plot(cards, unlist(lapply(col.w$weights, sum)),xlim=c(0,10),
ylim=c(0,10), xlab="number of links", ylab="row sums of weights")
col.b <- nb2listw(col.gal.nb, style="B")
points(cards, unlist(lapply(col.b$weights, sum)), col="red")
col.c <- nb2listw(col.gal.nb, style="C")
points(cards, unlist(lapply(col.c$weights, sum)), col="green")
col.s <- nb2listw(col.gal.nb, style="S")
points(cards, unlist(lapply(col.s$weights, sum)), col="blue")
legend(x=c(0, 1), y=c(7, 9), legend=c("W", "B", "C", "S"),
col=c("black", "red", "green", "blue"), pch=rep(1,4))
dlist <- nbdists(col.gal.nb, coords)
dlist <- lapply(dlist, function(x) 1/x)
col.w.d <- nb2listw(col.gal.nb, glist=dlist)
summary(unlist(col.w$weights))
summary(unlist(col.w.d$weights))