The Development of an Areal Interpolation ArcGIS Extension and a Comparative Study

Abstract

Areal interpolation has been an active research area, but its wide adoption in the general GIS community is limited due to the lack of implementation tools in commercial software. To bridge this gap, an areal interpolation extension is developed in ArcGIS with 4 popular algorithms, 10 raster and vector implementations, and 4 commonly used error measures. A comparative case study utilizing the extension shows that it provides general users with a user-friendly interface for performing areal interpolation without dealing with the complexities of the underlying algorithms and their implementation details.