A New Statistical Approach to Geographic Variation Analysis
The authors discuss the problems of describing geographic variation data and develop statistical methods for categorizing sets of populations sampled from different localities. The general approach of the simultaneous test procedures, available with a variety of statistical tests and for continuous as well as for categorical data, is employed with these techniques. Geographical regions are defined as sets of connected localities, with connectedness being defined geometrically. Maximal acceptable connected sets of localities (defined as regions) or coarsest acceptable connected partitions of the entire set of localities are found by these procedures. These are illustrated with several examples.