Entropy and Diversity Indices for Spatial and Temporal Data

Dear Colleagues,

Entropy, as a concept and a tool to measure heterogeneity in distributional properties, has been widely used in many disciplines, and is still of significant importance in geography, ecology and other fields dealing with discrete spatio-temporal data. The roots of entropy come from information theory, and it belongs to the set of diversity indices, together with other popular examples such as Simpson’s index and the general Hill’s number. They are known to evaluate alpha, beta and gamma diversity in biodiversity and ecological studies; however, synthetic measures of heterogeneity are of interest over a wide variety of natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, wildfires, polluting agent, meteorological events and epidemiological data. Other fields of application, though not traditionally open to entropy and diversity measures, may benefit from the flexibility and interpretability of such indices.

In the aforementioned studies, the spatio-temporal support of data constitutes a stimulating challenge. The definition of spatial and spatio-temporal entropy for categorical data in the literature has evolved from Shannon’s entropy to a more complex description taking into account unequal grid sizes, area partitions, co-occurrences of observations for contiguous areas or based on a certain distance range of interest; they are applied to both areal and point data, and ascribe to various approaches. When the goal expands from data description to inference, indices need to be complicated accordingly in order to deal with data dependence on available covariates and on temporal/spatial effects.

This Special Issue intends to explore some of these aspects. Papers are welcome which cover new challenges in entropy and other diversity indices, either from a pertinent data analysis perspective (e.g., compelling examples and best use) or from a more methodological focus (e.g., critical thinking, new approaches and novel concepts).

Dr. Didier G Leibovici
Dr. Linda Altieri
Guest Editors

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