is of importance in applications where it is reasonable to postulate the existence of corresponding set of random variables at locations that have not been included in a sample. Thus rainfall may be measured at a set of rain gauge locations, and such measurements can be considered as outcomes of random variables, but rainfall clearly occurs at other locations and would again be random. Because rainfall exhibits properties of autocorrelation, spatial interpolation techniques can be used to estimate rainfall amounts at locations near measured locations. As with other types of statistical dependence, the presence of spatial dependence generally leads to estimates of an average value from a sample being less accurate than had the samples been independent, although if negative dependence exists a sample average can be better than in the independent case. A different problem than that of estimating an overall average is that of spatial interpolation: here the problem is to estimate the unobserved random outcomes of variables at locations intermediate to places where measurements are made, on that there is spatial dependence between the observed and unobserved random variables. Tools for exploring spatial dependence include: spatial correlation, spatial covariance functions and semivariograms. Methods for spatial interpolation include Kriging, which is a type of best linear unbiased prediction. The topic of spatial dependence is of importance to geostatistics and spatial analysis. Spatial auto-correlation Spatial dependency is the co-variation of properties within geographic space: characteristics at proximal locations appear to be correlated, either positively or negatively. Spatial dependency leads to the spatial autocorrelation problem in statistics since, like temporal autocorrelation, this violates standard statistical techniques that assume independence among observations. For example, regression analyses that do not compensate for spatial dependency can have unstable parameter estimates and yield unreliable significance tests. Spatial regression models (see below) capture these relationships and do not suffer from these weaknesses. It is also appropriate to view spatial dependency as a source of information rather than something to be corrected. Locational effects also manifest as spatial heterogeneity, or the apparent variation in a process with respect to location in geographic space. Unless a space is uniform and boundless, every location will have some degree of uniqueness relative to the other locations. This affects the spatial dependency relations and therefore the spatial process. Spatial heterogeneity means that overall parameters estimated for the entire system may not adequately describe the process at any given location. Spatial