Luc Anselin

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Luc E. Anselin (born December 1, 1953) is one of the developers of the field of spatial econometrics.

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Life and contributions

Luc Anselin was previously the Regents' Professor, Walter Isard Chair and Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University (ASU) where he attracted some of the leading spatial econometrics scholars. He also founded and directed the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation at ASU to develop, implement, apply, and disseminate spatial analysis methods. In 2016, the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis relocated to the University of Chicago. [1] He held prior appointments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Dallas, West Virginia University, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Ohio State University. His joint appointments included a range of disciplines, including Geography, Urban and Regional Planning, Economics, Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Political Economy and Political Science.

In recent years,[ when? ] several national and international awards recognized Anselin's achievements, including his development of new spatial methodologies (e.g., local indicators of statistical association) and spatial software tools. The Regional Science Association International elected him as Fellow in 2004, and awarded him their Walter Isard Prize in 2005 and their William Alonso Memorial Prize in 2006. In 2008, Anselin was awarded one of the nation's highest academic honors by being elected to the National Academy of Sciences as well as to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, Anselin was elected as a University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Fellow (UCGIS).

2008 marked the 20th anniversary of the book Spatial Econometrics: Methods and Models that Anselin is best known for and that has been cited over 6,000 times. One of Anselin's achievements has been his contributions to moving the discipline of spatial econometrics from the margins in 1988 to current acceptance in mainstream econometrics, thereby advancing the econometric foundations of Geographic Information Science. His publications include several hundred articles and edited books (including New Directions in Spatial Econometrics in 1995 and Advances in Spatial Econometricsmin 2004) in the fields of Quantitative Geography, Regional Science, GIScience, Econometrics, Economics and Computer Science.

His development of spatial software further facilitated the establishment of spatial econometrics. Software tools include SpaceStat (spatial econometrics), GeoDa (exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regression modeling), and collaborative efforts such as PySAL, an open source library of spatial analytic functions based on the Python programming language. GeoDa had over 56,000 users within six years of its creation.

A native of Belgium, Anselin graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in economics in 1975 and summa cum laude with an M.S. in Statistics, Econometrics and Operations in 1976, both from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Around this time, the origins of spatial econometrics began to take shape in economics departments in the Netherlands and geography/regional science departments in the UK. In 1977, he moved from Belgium to the U.S. to enroll in Cornell University's interdisciplinary doctoral program in regional science. This provided the opportunity to work with Walter Isard and William Greene. He earned his doctorate in regional science in 1980.

Selected works

Books

Articles and book chapters

Related Research Articles

Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference". An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships". Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics. The other, Ragnar Frisch, also coined the term in the sense in which it is used today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geographic information system</span> System to capture, manage and present geographic data

A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database, however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.

Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, migration analysis, land use and urban development, interindustry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geomatics</span> Geographic data discipline

Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic (geospatial) data. It is also known as geomatic(s) engineering. Surveying engineering was the widely used name for geomatic(s) engineering in the past.

Computational Economics is an interdisciplinary research discipline that involves computer science, economics, and management science. This subject encompasses computational modeling of economic systems. Some of these areas are unique, while others established areas of economics by allowing robust data analytics and solutions of problems that would be arduous to research without computers and associated numerical methods.

A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spatial analysis</span> Formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties

Spatial analysis is any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques using different analytic approaches, especially spatial statistics. In may be applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, or to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is geospatial analysis, the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. It may also be applied to genomics, as in transcriptomics data.

The GeoNetwork opensource (GNOS) project is a free and open source (FOSS) cataloging application for spatially referenced resources. It is a catalog of location-oriented information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeoDa</span>

GeoDa is a free software package that conducts spatial data analysis, geovisualization, spatial autocorrelation and spatial modeling.

Indicators of spatial association are statistics that evaluate the existence of clusters in the spatial arrangement of a given variable. For instance, if we are studying cancer rates among census tracts in a given city local clusters in the rates mean that there are areas that have higher or lower rates than is to be expected by chance alone; that is, the values occurring are above or below those of a random distribution in space.

Morans <i>I</i>

In statistics, Moran's I is a measure of spatial autocorrelation developed by Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran. Spatial autocorrelation is characterized by a correlation in a signal among nearby locations in space. Spatial autocorrelation is more complex than one-dimensional autocorrelation because spatial correlation is multi-dimensional and multi-directional.

Hexagon Geospatial's GeoMedia Professional is a geographic information system (GIS) management solution for map generation and the analysis of geographic information with smart tools that capture and edit spatial data. GeoMedia is used for: creating geographic data; managing geospatial databases; joining business data, location intelligence and geographic data together; creating hard and soft-copy maps; conduct analysis in 'real-time'; base platform for multiple applications, geographic data validation, publishing geospatial information and analyzing mapped information.

Spatial econometrics is the field where spatial analysis and econometrics intersect. The term “spatial econometrics” was introduced for the first time by the Belgian economist Jean Paelinck in the general address he delivered to the annual meeting of the Dutch Statistical Association in May 1974 . In general, econometrics differs from other branches of statistics in focusing on theoretical models, whose parameters are estimated using regression analysis. Spatial econometrics is a refinement of this, where either the theoretical model involves interactions between different entities, or the data observations are not truly independent. Thus, models incorporating spatial auto-correlation or neighborhood effects can be estimated using spatial econometric methods. Such models are common in regional science, real estate economics, education economics, housing market and many others. Adopting a more general view, in the by-law of the Spatial Econometrics Association, the discipline is defined as the set of “models and theoretical instruments of spatial statistics and spatial data analysis to analyse various economic effects such as externalities, interactions, spatial concentration and many others”. Recent developments tend to include also methods and models from social network econometrics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CrimeStat</span>

CrimeStat is a crime mapping software program. CrimeStat is Windows-based program that conducts spatial and statistical analysis and is designed to interface with a geographic information system (GIS). The program is developed by Ned Levine & Associates under the direction of Ned Levine, with funding by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), an agency of the United States Department of Justice. The program and manual are distributed for free by NIJ.

Anil K. Bera is an Indian-American econometrician. He is Professor of Economics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's Department of Economics. He is most noted for his work with Carlos Jarque on the Jarque–Bera test.

CyberGIS, or cyber geographic information science and systems, is a term used to describe the use of cyberinfrastructure, to perform GIS tasks with storage and processing resources of multiple institutions through the World Wide Web. CyberGIS focuses on computational and data-intensive geospatial problem-solving within various research and education domains by leveraging the power of distributed computation. CyberGIS has been described as "GIS detached from the desktop and deployed on the web, with the associated issues of hardware, software, data storage, digital networks, people, training and education" categorizing it as either Internet or Web GIS. The term CyberGIS first entered the literature in 2010, and is predominantly used by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and collaborators to describe their software and research developed to use big data and high-performance computing approaches to collaborative problem-solving.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manfred M. Fischer</span>

Manfred M. Fischer is an Austrian and German regional scientist, Emeritus Professor of economic geography at the WU-Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Giuseppe Arbia is an Italian statistician. He is known for his contributions to the field of spatial statistics and spatial econometrics. In 2006 together with Jean Paelinck he founded the Spatial Econometrics Association, which he has been chairing ever since.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spatial neural network</span> Category of tailored neural networks

Spatial neural networks (SNNs) constitute a supercategory of tailored neural networks (NNs) for representing and predicting geographic phenomena. They generally improve both the statistical accuracy and reliability of the a-spatial/classic NNs whenever they handle geo-spatial datasets, and also of the other spatial (statistical) models whenever the geo-spatial datasets' variables depict non-linear relations.

References

  1. spatial.uchicago.edu.