Comparison of relative density of two random geometric digraph families in testing spatial clustering

We compare the performance of relative densities of two parameterized random geometric digraph families called proximity catch digraphs (PCDs) in testing bivariate spatial patterns. These PCD families are proportional edge (PE) and central similarity (CS) PCDs and are defined with proximity regions based on relative positions of data points from two classes. The relative densities of these PCDs were previously used as statistics for testing segregation and association patterns against complete spatial randomness. The relative density of a digraph, D, with n vertices (i.e., with order n) represents the ratio of the number of arcs in D to the number of arcs in the complete symmetric digraph of the same order. When scaled properly, the relative density of a PCD is a U-statistic; hence, it has asymptotic normality by the standard central limit theory of U-statistics. The PE- and CS-PCDs are defined with an expansion parameter that determines the size or measure of the associated proximity regions. In this article, we extend the distribution of the relative density of CS-PCDs for expansion parameter being larger than one, and compare finite sample performance of the tests by Monte Carlo simulations and asymptotic performance by Pitman asymptotic efficiency. We find the optimal expansion parameters of the PCDs for testing each alternative in finite samples and in the limit as the sample size tending to infinity. As a result of our comparisons, we demonstrate that in terms of empirical power (i.e., for finite samples) relative density of CS-PCD has better performance (which occurs for expansion parameter values larger than one) for the segregation alternative, while relative density of PE-PCD has better performance for the association alternative. The methods are also illustrated in a real-life data set from plant ecology. Copyright Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa 2014