#6364. Computation of the distance between a polygon and a point in spatial analysis
September 2026 | publication date |
Proposal available till | 19-05-2025 |
4 total number of authors per manuscript | 0 $ |
The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for |
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Journal’s subject area: |
Geography, Planning and Development;
Library and Information Sciences;
Information Systems; |
Places in the authors’ list:
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)
Abstract:
Distance is one of the most important concepts in geography and spatial analysis. Since distance calculation is straightforward for points, measuring distances for non-point objects often involves abstracting them into their representative points. For example, a polygon is often abstracted into its centroid, and the distance from/to the polygon is then measured using the centroid. Despite the wide use of representative points to measure distances of non-point objects, a recent study has shown that such a practice might be problematic and lead to biased coefficient estimates in regression analysis. The study proposed a new polygon-to-point distance metric, along with two computation algorithms. However, the efficiency of these distance calculation algorithms is low. This research provides three new methods, including the random point-based method, polygon partitioning method, and axis-aligned minimum areal bounding box-based (MABB-based) method, to compute the new distance metric. Tests are provided to compare the accuracy and computational efficiency of the new algorithms.
Keywords:
computational efficiency; Distance; polygon; spatial analysis
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