This vignette formed pp. 239–251 of the first edition of Bivand, R. S., Pebesma, E. and Gómez-Rubio V. (2008) Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R, Springer-Verlag, New York. It was retired from the second edition (2013) to accommodate material on other topics, and is made available in this form with the understanding of the publishers.
Creating spatial weights is a necessary step in using areal data, perhaps just to check that there is no remaining spatial patterning in residuals. The first step is to define which relationships between observations are to be given a non-zero weight, that is to choose the neighbour criterion to be used; the second is to assign weights to the identified neighbour links.
The 281 census tract data set for eight central New York State counties featured prominently in (Waller and Gotway 2004) will be used in many of the examples, supplemented with tract boundaries derived from TIGER 1992 and distributed by SEDAC/CIESIN. The boundaries have been projected from geographical coordinates to UTM zone~18. This file is not identical with the boundaries used in the original source, but is very close and may be re-distributed, unlike the version used in the book. Starting from the census tract queen contiguities, where all touching polygons are neighbours, used in (Waller and Gotway 2004) and provided as a DBF file on their website, a GAL format file has been created and read into R.
library(spdep)
NY8 <- as(sf::st_read(system.file("shapes/NY8_utm18.shp", package="spData")), "Spatial")## Reading layer `NY8_utm18' from data source
## `/home/rsb/lib/r_libs/spData/shapes/NY8_utm18.shp' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 281 features and 17 fields
## Geometry type: POLYGON
## Dimension: XY
## Bounding box: xmin: 358241.9 ymin: 4649755 xmax: 480393.1 ymax: 4808545
## Projected CRS: WGS 84 / UTM zone 18NNY_nb <- read.gal(system.file("weights/NY_nb.gal", package="spData"), region.id=as.character(as.int