Spatstat

analysing spatial point patterns

• Home
• News
• Download
• Docs
• Book
• Courses
• Help
• FAQ
• About

Software documentation

To get help about spatstat, the main sources are:

• The help and help.search commands in R
• Quick Reference Guide (pdf) listing all functions and datasets. This can be displayed in R by typing help(spatstat)
• Complete manual for the package, containing all the help files (pdf, 40 pages, 292Kb)

The Quick Reference Guide is good for browsing around for functions if you are looking to do a specific task.

Book

The recently published book [1] is a comprehensive course on analysing spatial point patterns using the spatstat package. It is available as an eBook or in print.

[1] A. Baddeley, E. Rubak and R.Turner. Spatial Point Patterns: Methodology and Applications with R. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 2015. Publisher’s web page for book

Visit our companion website for the book for a table of contents, free sample chapters, R code for producing figures and output in all chapters, etc.

Older references

The following articles, which are older than the book, described many of the main concepts in spatstat. Article [2] introduced the package and described basic use. Article [3] explained how to fit models to point pattern data. Article [4] extended the scope of Gibbs models.

[2] A. Baddeley and R. Turner. Spatstat: an R package for analyzing spatial point patterns Journal of Statistical Software 12: 6 (2005) 1-42. www.jstatsoft.org ISSN: 1548-7660
Direct download here (42 pages, pdf, 1.05 Mb)

[3] A. Baddeley and R. Turner. Modelling spatial point patterns in R. Chapter 2, pages 23-74 in In Case Studies in Spatial Point Pattern Modelling (eds. A. Baddeley, P. Gregori, J. Mateu, R. Stoica and D. Stoyan) Lecture Notes in Statistics 185. New York: Springer-Verlag 2006. ISBN: 0-387-28311-0

[4] A. Baddeley, R. Turner, J. Mateu and A. Bevan. Hybrids of Gibbs point process models and their implementation. Journal of Statistical Software 55 (2013) 11, 1-43 Download here

Citing spatstat

If you use spatstat for research that leads to publications, it would be much appreciated if you could acknowledge spatstat in your publications, preferably citing our recent book [1].

Citations help us to justify the expenditure of time and effort on maintaining and developing the package.

• The definitive reference for spatstat is the book [1].
• The first detailed description of spatstat appeared in reference [2] above. Please cite [1] and [2] if you are reviewing or comparing different software packages.
• Hybrids of point processes were introduced in [4]. Please cite [4] if you use hybrid models.
• Bibtex bibliography file of articles on spatstat

The help files for spatstat and the supporting documentation are copyright. Please do not copy substantial amounts of text from the spatstat help files into a scientific publication, without proper acknowledgement.