Development of a Spatial Path-Analysis Method for Spatial Data Analysis

Abstract

Path analysis is a method used to analyze the relationship between independent and dependent variables to identify direct and indirect relationship between them. This method is developed by Sewal Wright and initially only uses correlation analysis results in identifying the variables' relationship. Path analysis method currently is mostly used to deal with variables with non-spatial data type. When analyzing variables that have elements of spatial dependency, path analysis could result in a less precise model. Therefore, it is necessary to build a path analysis model that is able to identify and take into account the effects of spatial dependencies. Spatial autocorrelation and spatial regression methods can be used to develop path analysis method so as to identify the effects of spatial dependencies. This paper proposes a method in the form of path analysis method development to process data that have spatial elements. This study also discusses our effort on establishing a method that could be used to identify and analyze the spatial effect on data in the framework of path analysis; we call this method spatial path analysis.