Spatial data, also known as geospatial data, identifies geographic locations, such as natural or constructed features around us. Although all observations have some spatial content, such as the location of the observation, but this is out of most data analysis tools' range due to the complex nature of spatial information; alternatively, the spatiality might not be that interesting (at first sight) in the given research topic.
On the other hand, analyzing spatial data can reveal some very important underlying structures of the data, and it is well worth spending time visualizing the differences and similarities between close or far data points.
In this chapter, we are going to help with this and will use a variety of R packages to:
Retrieve geospatial information from the Internet
Visualize points and polygons on a map
Compute some spatial statistics