Statistics professor Higham authors new software library for analysis of spatial data

Matt Higham is a collaborator on the R package spmodel, which is a software package used to model spatial data. The statistical package R is one of the most popular environments for doing statistical analysis and data science.  An R package is a library of functions for a particular task, in this case analyzing spatial data.  Spatial data commonly arises in ecological and epidemiological applications and consists of observations that are indexed by spatial coordinates (like Latitude and Longitude). The paper, published in the PLOS One Journal, describes the overall goals of the spmodel package and gives a brief introduction on how to use the package to model various types of spatial data.

Higham is also a collaborator on a paper discussing the comparison of two different paradigms of analyzing spatial data: design-based analysis and model-based analysis. The paper is published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.  Here is a link to the paper https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282524 

Dr. Higham is also a maintainer of the sptotal package.  More about that package can be found here 

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/spmodel/vignettes/basics.pdf.  Since it’s publication in late 2022, the spmodel package has already been downloaded nearly 2000 times. 

 Dr. Matt Higham is a statistician and data scientist whose research interests are in spatial statistics applied to ecological settings and in development of packages for the statistical software R.  He holds a doctorate in Statistics from Oregon State University and he has worked extensively with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.  He is also a graduate of Miami University (OH) where he earned degrees in Botany, Statistics and Zoology.  His dissertation was entitled “Spatial Prediction for Finite Populations with Ecological Applications.”  At St. Lawrence, Professor Higham regularly teaches the Foundations of Data Science course as well as a Data Visualization course that he designed.