[R-sig-Geo] Creating very large spatial weight matrix

[Aleksandr Andreev]

Hello list,

I have 120,000 geocoded observations, for which I'm trying to create a
distance-based spatial weighting matrix so that I can perform a Moran
test.

Each observation has Lat and Lon.

Unfortunately, when I run
dists <- as.matrix(dist(cbind(Lon, Lat)))
I get the message:
Error in vector("double", length) : vector size specified is too large

Now I realize that 120,000^2 / 2 is on the order of 6 GB. However, I
seem to be running into software limitations on the vector size before
I hit RAM limitations. Also, in principle, it should be possible
(though slow) to use hard disk space to store this matrix. Does anyone
have any ideas on how to do this in R?

Thanks,

------------------------
Aleksandr Andreev
Graduate Student - Department of Economics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill