POINTSTAT is a spatial statistics program for the analysis of point locations. It takes as input the X and Y-coordinates of a number of points (either in latitudes and longitudes, or in projected units), allows for the weighting of these points, and then calculates a number of spatial statistics on the distribution. Among the statistics are the mean center, the standard distance deviation, the standard deviational ellipse, 1st-order nearest neighbor analysis, k-order nearest neighbors (up to 100), Moran's "I" if the points have been weighted, and various distance matrices (distance from each point to every other point; distance from each point in a primary file to each point in a secondary file). The program can be used to analyze events (e.g., crime incidents, accident locations) or the spatial distribution of particular types of organization. We have used it to analyze the distribution of motor vehicle accidents in Honolulu, bus crime incidents in Los Angeles, California cities enacting various growth measures, buildings within the City of Los Angeles which were damaged by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and buildings which were rebuilt after the 1992 Los Angeles riot.

Currently, the full program exists for Sun Unix systems only. It will probably work on other Unix systems. A DOS version is included which can handle a limited number of cases (probably 800 or fewer). We hope to provide a full-blown DOS version in the near future.

The complete citation for POINTSTAT is:

• Ned Levine, Chai Khoo, Donna Okazaki, Karl E. Kim, and Lawrence H. Nitz. 1994. Pointstat: A Statistical Program for Analyzing the Spatial Distribution of Point Locations (Version 1.0). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii at Manoa.
  • DOS Version (1.1) By Kwee Phua and Steven Wojnarowski, OZ INFO Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia, June 1996.

• Ned Levine, Karl E. Kim, and Lawrence H. Nitz. 1995. "Spatial analysis of Honolulu motor vehicle crashes: I. Spatial patterns". Accident Analysis & Prevention, 27 (5), 663-674.

• Ned Levine. 1996. "Spatial statistics and GIS: software tools to quantify spatial patterns". Journal of the American Planning Association. 62 (3), 381-392.