GeoPrism, A Decomposition of Geo-spatial Structure

A prism breaks up light into its constituent spectral colors. The separation of light into spectrum bands allows for the identification of objects based on their spectral signature. Similarly, given a geographic landscape represented mathematically, decomposition of the spatial structure can help establish the relationship between a geographic variable such as average housing values and specific components of the spatial structure. These structural components can be identified through an approach called Eigenvector Spatial Filtering (ESF) which acts like an optical prism--GeoPrism. The geospatial structural components extracted by a GeoPrism can be visualized as a map sequence revealing structural influences as well as a synthetic quantitative variable representing spatial information often missing in conventional regression models.