This Advanced Introduction provides a critical review and discussion of research concerning spatial statistics, differentiating between it and spatial econometrics, to answer a set of core questions covering the geographic-tagging-of-data origins of the concept and its theoretical underpinnings, conceptual advances, and challenges for future scholarly work. It offers a vital tool for understanding spatial statistics and surveys how concerns about violating the independent observations assumption of statistical analysis developed into this discipline.

Key Features:

• A concise overview of spatial statistics theory and methods, looking at parallel developments in geostatistics and spatial econometrics, highlighting the eclipsing of centography and point pattern analysis by geostatistics and spatial autoregression, and the emergence of local analysis
• Contemporary descriptions of popular geospatial random variables, emphasizing one- and two-parameter spatial autoregression specifications, and Moran eigenvector spatial filtering coupled with a broad coverage of statistical estimation techniques
• A detailed articulation of a spatial statistical workflow conceptualization

The helpful insights from empirical applications of spatial statistics in agronomy, criminology, demography, economics, epidemiology, geography, remotely sensed data, urban studies, and zoology/botany, will make this book a useful tool for upper-level students in these disciplines.