This vignette tracks the legacy nb vignette, which was based on part of the first (2008) edition of ASDAR. It adds hints to the code in the nb vignette to use the sf vector representation instead of the sp vector representation to create neighbour objects. .
This is a summary of the results below:
In general, if you need to reproduce results from using "Spatial" objects in spdep, coerce sf objects to sp objects before constructing neighbour objects (particularly if polygon centroids are used for point representation).
However, for new work, you should use "sf" objects read in using sf.
From spdep 1.1-7, a number of steps have been taken to choose more efficient approaches especially for larger data sets, using functions in sf and the approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) implementation in dbscan rather than RANN.
We’ll use the whole NY 8 county set of boundaries, as they challenge the implementations more than just the Syracuse subset. The description of the input geometries from ADSAR is: New York leukemia: used and documented extensively in Waller and Gotway (2004) and with data formerly made available in Chap. 9 of http://web1.sph.emory.edu/users/lwaller/ch9index.htm; the data import process is described in the help file of NY_data in spData; geometries downloaded from the CIESIN server at https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/acrp-boundary-1992/data-download, file /pub/census/usa/tiger/ny/bna_st/t8_36.zip, and extensively edited; a zip archive NY_data.zip of shapefiles and a GAL format neighbours list is on the book website. Further, the zipfile is now at a new location requiring login. The object listw_NY is directly imported from nyadjwts.dbf on the Waller & Gotway (2004) chapter 9 website.
The version of the New York 8 counties geometries used in ASDAR and included as a shapefile in spdep was converted from the original BNA file using an external utility program to convert to MapInfo format and converted on from there using GDAL 1.4.1 (the OGR BNA driver was not then availab