Title: A novel soft spatial weights matrix method based on soft sets

Authors: Xianning Wang; Zhi Xiao

Addresses: School of Economics and Business Administration, Chongqing University, No. 174 Shazhengjie, Shapingba District, 400044, Chongqing, China ' School of Economics and Business Administration, Chongqing Key Laboratory of Logistics, Chongqing University, No. 174 Shazhengjie, Shapingba District, Chongqing, 400044, China

Abstract: Soft sets are efficient and flexible tools to describe uncertainty and fuzziness. In this paper, we integrate soft set theory into the specification of fuzzy spatial dependent relationship and provide a framework for spatial weight description. We treat the configuration of spatial location relationship as soft sets and propose a new dependence measure based on operations of soft sets. The proposed soft spatial weights matrix efficiently combines information of 'spatial adjacent relation' and 'spatial distance'. Further, Chinese regional industrial agglomeration data are applied to empirical analysis. The spatial autoregressive error panel model (SEM) with our new matrix performs better than that of Moran's I, log-likelihood and interpretation.

Keywords: spatial weights matrices; soft sets; spatial autoregressive error panel model; SEM; uncertainty; fuzziness; spatial location relationship; China.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2016.078222

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2016 Vol.9 No.1, pp.39 - 69

Received: 23 Oct 2015
Accepted: 10 May 2016
Published online: 08 Aug 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article