The purpose of this book is to present Statistics for spatial data to scientists and engineers. (Notice that Statistics is capitalized to distinguish it from its other meaning: a collection of numbers that summarize a complex phenomenon - such as baseball or cricket). In the last 10 years, much interest has been generated in the area, but its exposure in the literature has been uneven. This book attempts to take that literature and extend it, correct it, and unify it. What appears to be a gathering of unconnected subject areas can be annealed into a cohesive approach to the analysis of spatial data. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the approach and of the enormous diversity of problems involving spatial data, from the microscopic to the astronomic. The book attempts to give a somewhat complete coverage of each of three parts, dealing with geostatistical data, lattice data, and point patterns. Thus, the subject areas are classified according to the type of observations encountered, reflecting my belief that the roots of statistical science are in data. Statistical models, then, try to make sense out of the data, albeit imperfectly. Design, inference, and diagnostics are natural consequences of the datamodel symbiosis, and all play an important role in Statistics for spatial data.
