Matrix Comparison, Goodness-of-Fit, and Spatial Interaction Modeling

Abstract
The usefulness of various statistics for comparing observed and predicted spatial interaction matrices is examined. Results indicate that some statistics may yield misleading information about error levels in predicted matrices. Other statistics are found to be unsuitable for significance testing. The concept of experimental distributions is discussed for several of the statistics. Although framed in the context of spatial interaction modeling, the discussion is relevant to most matrix comparison problems.