Ecological inference and spatial heterogeneity: an entropy-based distributionally weighted regression approach

Abstract

In this article we compare two competing approaches to ecological modelling using test data. The first approach is based on the "traditional" method of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), assuming constancy of parameters across disaggregated spatial units (spatial homogeneity). The second (new) approach is based on the method of Generalised Cross-Entropy (GCE), assuming varying parameters (spatial heterogeneity). The latter approach is designated as entropy-based "distributionally weighted regression" (DWR).....