Employing a Centroid Transferring Curve to Spatio-temporal Evolution Patterns

To express the geographical phenomenon spatio-temporal evolution patterns,many methods via graphs as the result of spatial autocorrelation analysis have been proposed.However,these methods do not effectively express spatio-temporal evolution.Thus,a centroid-based method was employed to express quantitatively the spatio-temporal evolution patterns.Malaria spatial distributions data,for Hunan Province centroid coordinates are computed of every year from 1983 to 1992,as an example.Next,the spatio-temporal malaria evolution process in Hunan Province is expressed via the malaria barycenter curve,composed of these centroid coordinates.In order to verify the results,we compared the centroid-based results and the results from a common spatial autocorrelation analysis technique.The comparison showed two results are in agreement.Finally,two-scale malaria barycenter curve are computed.This experiments showed that the multi-scale effect is not so obvious.