R Packages for Analyzing Spatial Data: A Comparative Case Study with Areal Data

The count of open source software packages hosted by the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) using key spatial data handling has now passed 1,000. Providing a comprehensive review these is beyond scope an article. Consequently, this takes form comparative case study, reproducing some approach and workflow analysis set including almost all census tracts in coterminous United States. study moves from visualization construction weights matrix, to exploratory regression. For comparison, implementations same steps PySAL GeoDa are interwoven, points convergence divergence noted discussed. Conclusions drawn about usefulness software, significance sharing contributions both implementation but also more broadly reproducible research, opportunities for exchanging ideas solutions with other research domains.