PrintBackground
During the first part of this week's project, you will be examining randomness in the context of spatial processes. This is a critical issue, because human beings are predisposed to seeing patterns where there are none, and are also not good at understanding the implications of randomness.
For example, if you ask someone to think of a number between 1 and 10, in Western culture at least, there is a much better than 1 in 10 chance that the number will be a 7. Similarly, if data for the national or state lottery tells you that the numbers 3, 11, 19, 24, 47, and 54 haven't 'come up' for many weeks, that should not be your cue to go out and pick those numbers; yet, for some people, it is, out of a misguided notion that on average all the numbers should come up just as often as each other. This is true, but it has no bearing on which particular numbers should come up in any particular week.
It is our weakness at dealing with the notion of randomness on this basic level that makes gambling such a profitable activity for those who do understand, by which I mean the casino owners and bookmakers, not the gamblers... anyway... this week, the project is an attempt to develop your feel for randomness by experimenting with a random spatial pattern generator, or in other words, a spatial process.
Project 3, Part A has been broken down into three sections where you will be exploring the outcomes of different processes:
- the Independent Random Process;
- the Inhomogenous Poisson Process; and
- interactions between events.
Work through each section, and answer the questions that have been posed to help you construct your project 3A write-up.
Project Resources
For Part A of this lesson's project, you will need an install of RStudio with the spatstat package installed and loaded.
Summary of Project 3A Deliverables
For Project 3A, the items you are required to include in your write-up are:
- Screen shots showing the different point patterns you generated according to different random processes with accompanying commentary that explains the patterns were created. Specific questions have been included in each section to guide you with the type of commentary to include.