Spatiotemporal Interpolation Methods in GIS: Exploring Data for Decision Making

Exploring large data sets with the aim of extracting useful information for decision making can be challenging. If the data were collected at different locations and times, one important question is how to obtain reliable estimates for missing data in space or time. For example, measurements such as ozone concentrations are usually collected only by a limited number of monitoring stations and at different time instances. In order to estimate the values at unmeasured locations or time instances, interpolation in continuous space and time is needed. New and old interpolation methods for exploring spatiotemporal data are discussed in this book. The selected methods are useful for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This book also includes comparisons of selected methods for several GIS case studies, as well as some visualization and query examples.

Lixin Li is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Georgia Southern University. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China in 1997 and 1999. In 2003 she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.