Abstract
Earth attributes show complex, heterogeneous spatial patterns generated by exogenous environmental factors and formation processes. This study investigates various strategies to quantify the underlying spatial patterns of simulated fields resembling real earthscapes and to compare their performance for describing them. The approach is to disaggregate the variability of earth attributes into two components, deterministic trend m(xi) and spatial dependence ε(xi), and determine the effects of m(xi) and ε(xi) on prediction accuracy under various combinations of spatial fields of earth attributes encountered in different earthscapes. We illustrate that cross-dependencies exist between spatial and feature accuracy. Scientific visualization is used to transpose quantitative results into visual space.