Pleased to finally see this short paper written with Ordnance Survey’s Stefano Cavazzi out. It is part of open-access LIPIcs proceedings, to be presented at GIScience 23 in Leeds 📄🌍🚶♀️.
📜 Ballatore, A. and Cavazzi, S. (2023) Why Is Greenwich so Common? Quantifying the Uniqueness of Multivariate Observations, 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023), LIPIcs, 277, 15:1—15:6 [PDF]
Abstract. The concept of uniqueness can play an important role when the assessment of an observation’s distinctiveness is essential. This article introduces a distance-based uniqueness measure that quantifies the relative rarity or commonness of a multi-variate observation within a dataset. Unique observations exhibit rare combinations of values, and not necessarily extreme values. Taking a cognitive psychological perspective, our measure defines uniqueness as the sum of distances between a target observation and all other observations. After presenting the measure u and its corresponding standardised version u_z, we propose a method to calculate a p value through a probability density function. We then demonstrate the measure’s behaviour in a case study on the uniqueness of Greater London boroughs, based on real-world socioeconomic variables. This initial investigation indicates that u can support exploratory data analysis.
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 