On 10/16/11, Hodgess, Erin, wrote: > Dear R Sig Geo People: > > Here is probably a dumb question, so please forgive me in advance (or > swear, whatever is most appropriate): could someone recommend a good > reference on IDW that has a numeric example, please?
Sure, check out Paul Bolstad's GIS Fundamentals textbook. My third edition has a very small worked example on pages 447-448. It is straightforward to implement a small worked IDW example in a spreadsheet. You can mess around with the form of the weight, the distance to the point to be interpolated, and so on. Of course, it is not too hard to do this in R, either! gstat can do it, and you can roll your own code, e.g.: # idw # A function to perform IDW Interpolation to a matrix # z is a vector of heights, distance is an mxn distance matrix # indicating distances between the m grid points and n scattered # sampled points, k is the power (typically 2), and num.neighs is # the closest x points to use in the interpolation. idw <- function(z, distance, k, num.neighs) { idw.z <- rep(0, length(distance[,1])) for (i in 1:length(distance[,1])) { d <- sort(distance[i,], index.return=TRUE) # sort to find closest points w <- 1 / d$x[1:num.neighs]^k # The vector of the weights idw.z[i] <- sum(z[d$ix[1:num.neighs]]*w) / sum(w) # The value for grid cell i } idw.mat <- matrix(idw.z, nrow=40, ncol=40) # convert to matrix return(idw.mat) } Hope this helps, Ashton On 10/16/11, Hodgess, Erin, wrote: > Dear R Sig Geo People: > > Here is probably a dumb question, so please forgive me in advance (or > swear, whatever is most appropriate): could someone recommend a good > reference on IDW that has a numeric example, please? > > I like to work things out on a small scale to see how they work. > > thanks, > Erin > > > Erin M. Hodgess, PhD > Associate Professor > Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences > University of Houston - Downtown > mailto: hodge...@uhd.edu > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > _______________________________________________ > R-sig-Geo mailing list > R-sig-Geo@r-project.org > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo ----- Ashton Shortridge Associate Professor ash...@msu.edu Dept of Geography http://www.msu.edu/~ashton 235 Geography Building ph (517) 432-3561 Michigan State University fx (517) 432-1671 _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo