Evaluating attraction in spatial point patterns with an application in the field of cultural history

Spatial collocation rules are often useful for describing dependencies between spatial features. Still, the commonly used criteria for the interestingness of the rules and the selected neighbourhood constraints for spatial objects may be too rough for capturing the essentials of such dependencies. We demonstrate the difficulties with concrete examples on a large place-name data set. We propose a technique based on simple density estimation for assessing the interesting-ness with different neighbouring constraints.