Fitting a Background Map to Spatial Data: Application in R

The goal of this work is to provide and explain a wayfrom a printed map to a fitted background map of a spatial dataset. Thevariables in this dataset can be from any field of interest, but there have to be twodimensional coordinates for each observation.One of several implemented transformation types hasto be chosen now. Furthermore we have to identify reference points on the map andselect reference points from the data. which later should have approximately the samecoordinates and are used for estimating the transformation parameters. The process of fittingthe background map is supposed to be iterative, sothat in each step new reference points could be added or wrongreference points could be deleted.The presented source code is available in the Rpackage DASplusR.

Alexander Kowarik graduated from Vienna University of Technologyin Technical Mathematics with a concentration on Statistics. Thiswork originated in his diploma thesis.