Lab five of Cartographic Skills forced us to dive into the dreaded field of statistics. The major portion of this module involved the completion of the ESRI online course "Exploring Spatial Patterns in Your Data Using ArcGIS." The above map was taken from the first exercise of that course with the finalizing addition of the map essentials (legend, scale bar, north arrow, title, author, date, and data source).
I am not very knowledgeable in the field of statistics, although I am aware of its utility in detecting trends and significant "hidden" characteristics of data collections. I was pleased, therefore, to see the ESRI course explain the various statistical tools in ArcMap in easy to understand terms (for the most part). For the map above, we utilized the Mean Center, Median Center, and Directional Distribution tools from the Spatial Statistics toolbox. The Mean Center tool averages the locations of all input data (weather stations in this case) and creates a layer symbolizing the average location. The Median Center tool does the same for the median location of input data. Although not identical, the similar locations for the mean and median centers indicate the data distribution is close to normal. Finally, the Directional Distribution tool creates a layer indicating the orientation of the data distribution. In this case, the orientation of the weather stations is primarily east-west with a slight northeast-southwest tilt.
As with many of the powerful tools built in to ArcMap, merely scratching the surface of the Spatial Statistics toolbox reveals the many options one has to analyze whatever types of data are available.
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