Neural Spatial Interaction Models

One of the major intellectual achievements and, at the same time, perhaps the most useful contribution of spatial analysis to social science literature has been the development of spatial interaction models. Spatial interaction can be broadly defined as movement of people, commodities, capital and/or information over geographical space (see Batten and Boyce 1986). Such interaction encompasses such diverse behaviour as migration, travel-to-work, shopping, recreation, commodity flows, capital flows, communication flows [e.g. telephone calls], airline passenger traffic, the choice of health care services, and even the attendance at events such as conferences, cultural and sport events (Haynes and Fotheringham 1984). In each case, it results from a decision process in which an individual trades off in some way the benefit of the interaction with the costs entailed in overcoming the spatial separation between the point of departure and the destination. It is the pervasiveness of this type of trade-off in spatial behaviour which has made spatial interaction analysis and modelling so important, and the subject of intensive investigation in human geography and regional science (Fotheringham and O’Kelly 1989).