[R-sig-Geo] Simple and Efficient way to Divide Study Area?

[Edzer J. Pebesma]

Kitty Lee wrote:
> Hi Roger, I forgot to mention I did try tripack and did go through your previous post. 
>
> But I'm doing a simulation and I have to repeat the process >1000 times. 
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>
> I feel using the voronoi method to divide up the study area may not be the most efficient way. I thought of dividing the area into grids(by generating random x-coor and y-coor). But the tricky part is that the study region is NOT rectangular. If I do 5*4=20 grids, since there're empty areas, I may have fewer than 20 regions at the end.....
>
>
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> I wonder how people divide their study area into a specific number of groups when the study region is not rectangular?
>
>   
If you're discretizing the are with square grid cells, you may want to 
think about clustering methods on x and y coordinates, especially 
k-means where you control the number of groups. If you set the number of 
iterations to 0 and 1 and use random seeds (taken in the area), you may 
get random partitioning.

I still have trouble imagening why you would want random partitions, and 
what this random process should reflect.
--
Edzer