Why do industrial clusters occur in space? Is it because industries need to stay close together to interact or, conversely, because they concentrate in certain portions of space to exploit favourable conditions like public incentives, proximity to communication networks, to big population...

This paper analyzes spatial Probit models for cross sectional dependent data in a binary choice context. Observations are divided by pairwise groups and bivariate normal distributions are specified within each group. Partial maximum likelihood estimators are introduced and they are shown to be...

A series of recent papers have introduced some explorative methods based on Ripley’s K-function (Ripley in J R Stat Soc B 39(2):172–212, <CitationRef CitationID="CR43">1977</CitationRef>) analyzing the micro-geographical patterns of firms. Often the spatial heterogeneity of an area is handled by referring to a case–control design, in...</citationref>

The contention of this paper is that many social science research problems are too “wicked” to be suitably studied using conventional statistical and regression-based methods of data analysis. This paper argues that an integrated geospatial approach based on methods of machine learning is...