Position of Houses in a Japanese Farming Village

Keywords: Poisson distribution, goodness of fit, spatial pattern

Description

West of Tokyo lies a large alluvial plain, dotted by a network of farming villages. Matui (1968) analysed the position of the 911 houses making up one of those villages. The area studied was a rectangle, 3 km by 4 km. A grid was superimposed over a map of the village, dividing its 12 square kilometres into 1200 plots, each 100 metres on a side. The numbers of houses on each of those plots are recorded in a 30 by 40 matrix of data.

The data are stored in text file with 30 rows and with data columns separated by spaces.

Download

Data File (tab-delimited text)

Source

Matui, Isamu (1968). Statistical study of the distribution of scattered villages in two regions of the Tonami Plain, Toyama Prefecture. In Spatial Patterns. Edited by Berry and Marble. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliff, NJ.

Larsen, R.J., and Marx, M.L., An Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications 2nd Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1986. Case Study 9.4.1.

Analysis

The marginal distribution of the number houses looks like a Poisson distribution. There may however be spatial correlation.

Larsen and Marx (1986) use this data to illustrate a chi-square goodness of fit test of the frequency distribution to the Poisson distribution.