Given two point patterns X
and Y
on the same linear
network, this function finds, for each point of X
,
the nearest point of Y
, measuring distance by the shortest path
in the network. The distance between these points
is also computed.
The return value is a data frame, with rows corresponding to
the points of X
. The first column gives the nearest neighbour
distances (i.e. the i
th entry is the distance
from the i
th point of X
to the nearest element of
Y
). The second column gives the indices of the nearest
neighbours (i.e.\ the i
th entry is the index of
the nearest element in Y
.)
If what="dist"
then only the vector of distances is returned.
If what="which"
then only the vector of indices is returned.
Note that this function is not symmetric in X
and Y
.
To find the nearest neighbour in X
of each point in Y
,
use nncross(Y,X)
.
The arguments iX
and iY
are used when
the two point patterns X
and Y
have some points in
common. In this situation nncross(X, Y)
would return some zero
distances. To avoid this, attach a unique integer identifier to
each point, such that two points are identical if their
identifying numbers are equal. Let iX
be the vector of
identifier values for the points in X
, and iY
the vector of identifiers for points in Y
. Then the code
will only compare two points if they have different values of the
identifier. See the Examples.
The k
th nearest neighbour may be undefined, for example
if there are fewer than k+1
points in the dataset, or if
the linear network is not connected.
In this case, the k
th nearest neighbour distance is infinite.