Smooth Pycnophylactic Interpolation for Geographical Regions
- 1 September 1979
- journal article
- research article
- Published by JSTOR in Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Vol. 74 (367) , 519
- https://doi.org/10.2307/2286968
Abstract
Census enumerations are usually packaged in irregularly shaped geographical regions. Interior values can be interpolated for such regions, without specification of “control points,” by using an analogy to elliptical partial differential equations. A solution procedure is suggested, using finite difference methods with classical boundary conditions. In order to estimate densities, an additional nonnegativity condition is required. Smooth contour maps, which satisfy the volume preserving and nonnegativity constraints, illustrate the method using actual geographical data. It is suggested that the procedure may be used to convert observations from one bureaucratic partitioning of a geographical area to another.Keywords
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: