Handling Fuzzy Spatial Data in R Using the fsr Package

Abstract

GIS and spatial data science (SDS) tools have been recently approaching each other by establishing bridge technologies between them. R as one of the most prominent programming languages used in SDS projects has been granted access to GIS infrastructure, while R scripts can be integrated and executed in GIS functions. Unfortunately, the treatment of spatial fuzziness has so far not been considered in SDS projects and bridge technologies due to a lack of software packages that can handle fuzzy spatial objects. This paper introduces an R package named fsr as an implementation of the fuzzy spatial data types, operations, and predicates of the Spatial Plateau Algebra that is based on the abstract Fuzzy Spatial Algebra. This R package solves the problem of constructing fuzzy spatial objects as spatial plateau objects from real datasets and describes how to conduct exploratory spatial data analysis by issuing geometric operations and topological predicates on fuzzy spatial objects. Further, fsr provides the possibility of designing fuzzy spatial inference models to discover new findings from fuzzy spatial objects. It optimizes the inference process by deploying the particle swarm optimization to obtain the point locations with the maximum or minimum inferred values that answer a specific user request.