Reframing Spatial Dependence as Geographic Feature Attribution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel perspective that interprets spatial dependence as the contribution of geographic coordinates to variable variation, validated through experiments showing high correlation with traditional spatial statistics.

Contribution

It proposes a new data-driven interpretation of spatial dependence as geographic feature contribution, bridging spatial statistics and machine learning.

Findings

High correlation (>0.94) between coordinate importance and LISA values.

Validation across various spatial processes confirms the robustness of the approach.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of using ML and XAI for spatial dependence analysis.

Abstract

Spatial dependence, referring to the correlation between variable values observed at different geographic locations, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of spatial data. The presence of spatial dependence violates the classical statistical assumption of independent and identically distributed observations and implies a high degree of information redundancy within spatial datasets. However, this redundancy can also be interpreted as structured information, which has been widely leveraged in spatial modeling, prediction, and explanation tasks. With the rise of geospatial big data and the rapid advancement of deep learning and large models, effectively modeling and characterizing spatial dependence has become essential for enhancing the performance of spatial analysis and uncovering latent spatial processes. From a data-driven perspective, this study proposes a novel interpretation: spatial dependence can be understood as the contribution of geographic location -- specifically, latitude and longitude -- to the observed variation in target variables. To validate this hypothesis, we conduct simulation experiments in which data are generated based on known spatial processes. We train machine learning models to predict variable values using only coordinate information. Subsequently, XAI techniques are employed to quantify the contribution of spatial features. The resulting importance scores are then compared with local indicators of spatial association (LISA). Across a range of spatial process settings, we observe consistently high correlations (greater than 0.94) between coordinate-based contributions and LISA values. These findings offer a new data-driven perspective on spatial dependence, bridging traditional spatial statistical approaches with modern machine learning techniques.