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I am reconstructing historical time series of land use and other related data from a variety of sources with different spatial and temporal resolutions and would be interested in what possible (hidden) problems could arise when aggregating and combining the data.

I am especially curious about the ecological fallacy and whether choices in the aggregation of temporal data affect change of support in the spatial dimension and vice versa?

References to literature are fine, but I am more interested in examples of how those interactions would arise if at all.

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  • I've read this on stats.se and I am familiar with the basics of spatial statistics, but haven't yet read too many actual research papers that deal with this issue.
    – Torsti
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 10:35
  • I found a blog entry and an abstract, but they don't quite answer the question on their own.
    – Torsti
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 12:47

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Have you read Openshaw's (1984) and Cressie's (1996) papers? This is a good place to start.

Openshaw, S. (1984). The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. CATMOG 38. Norwich: Geo Books. ISBN 0-86094-134-5. http://qmrg.org.uk/files/2008/11/38-maup-openshaw.pdf

Cressie, N. (1996) Change of Support and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Geographical Systems, 3:159-180.

If you examine the primary literature you will realize that the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem is inherently temporal in nature. Ecological Fallacy arises when you attempt to draw inference across levels of organization.

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  • I haven't got my hands on Cressie (1996) yet, but Openshaw does not directly discuss the statistical consequences of temporal aggregation and choice of time periods and whether they modify the effects of spatial grouping and zoning. de Jong and de Bruin (2012) doi:10.5194/bg-9-71-2012 discuss temporal aggregation, but not in the context of MAUP.
    – Torsti
    Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 10:13
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    This short paper by Cressie (1998) seems to be directly relevant: Aggregation and interaction issues in statistical modeling of spatiotemporal processes. Geoderma, 85: 133-140. doi:10.1016/S0016-7061(98)00017-2.
    – Torsti
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 20:24
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    The link to the Openshaw paper is broken. As of 2022, this is a working one: uio.no/studier/emner/sv/iss/SGO9010/openshaw1983.pdf (the year in the file name is a typo)
    – Christallkeks
    Commented Dec 15, 2022 at 14:07

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