Abstract
This paper extends the work of Blommestein and Koper (1992) - BK - on the construction of higher-order spatial lag operators without redundant and circular paths. For the case most relevant in spatial econometrics and spatial statistics, i.e., when contiguity between two observations (locations) is defined in a simple binary fashion, some deficiencies of the BK algorithms are outlined, corrected and an improvement suggested. In addition, three new algorithms are introduced and compared in terms of performance for a number of empirical contiguity structures. Particular attention is paid to a graph theoretic perspective on spatial lag operators and to the most efficient data structures for the storage and manipulation of spatial lags. The new forward iterative algorithm which uses a list form rather than a matrix to store the spatial lag information is shown to be several orders of magnitude faster than the BK solution. This allows the computation of proper higher-order spatial lags "on the fly" for even moderately large data sets such as 3,111 contiguous U. S. counties, which is not practical with the other algorithms.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 67-89 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Journal of Regional Science |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 1996 |
Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Development
- Environmental Science (miscellaneous)