R Packages for Analyzing Spatial Data: A Comparative Case Study with Areal Data

The count of open source software packages hosted by the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) using key spatial data handling packages has now passed 1,000. Providing a comprehensive review of these packages is beyond the scope of an article. Consequently, this review takes the form of a comparative case study, reproducing some of the approach and workflow of a spatial analysis of a data set including almost all the census tracts in the coterminous United States. The case study moves from visualization and the construction of a spatial weights matrix, to exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regression. For comparison, implementations of the same steps in PySAL and GeoDa are interwoven, and points of…