LIPIcs.GIScience.2023.15.pdf
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The concept of uniqueness can play an important role when the assessment of an observation’s distinctiveness is essential. This article introduces a distance-based uniqueness measure that quantifies the relative rarity or commonness of a multi-variate observation within a dataset. Unique observations exhibit rare combinations of values, and not necessarily extreme values. Taking a cognitive psychological perspective, our measure defines uniqueness as the sum of distances between a target observation and all other observations. After presenting the measure u and its corresponding standardised version u_z, we propose a method to calculate a p value through a probability density function. We then demonstrate the measure’s behaviour in a case study on the uniqueness of Greater London boroughs, based on real-world socioeconomic variables. This initial investigation indicates that u can support exploratory data analysis.
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