Connected components of a point pattern

Description

Finds the topologically-connected components of a point pattern, when all pairs of points closer than a threshold distance are joined.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'ppp'
connected(X, R, ...)

Arguments

Details

This function can be used to identify clumps of points in a point pattern.

The function connected is generic. This is the method for point patterns (objects of class "ppp").

The point pattern X is first converted into an abstract graph by joining every pair of points that lie closer than R units apart. Then the connected components of this graph are identified.

Two points in X belong to the same connected component if they can be reached by a series of steps between points of X, each step being shorter than R units in length.

The result is a vector of labels for the points of X where all the points in a connected component have the same label.

Value

A point pattern, equivalent to X except that the points have factor-valued marks, with levels corresponding to the connected components.

Author(s)

Adrian Baddeley Adrian.Baddeley@uwa.edu.au http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~adrian/ and Rolf Turner r.turner@auckland.ac.nz

See Also

connected.im, im.object, tess

Examples

   Y <- connected(redwood, 0.13)
   if(interactive()) {
     plot(Y, cols=1:length(levels(f)))
     plot(split(Y))
   }