Spatial Autocorrelation Test of Engineering Deformation Data

Deformation of engineering structures is often measured in order to ensure that the structure is exhibiting a safe behavior. The relationship between deformation and environmental factors is often studied through regression to pick out ambient factors which have major impact on the deformation of the engineering structure. One of the regression assumptions is independence of observations. However, when observations are closer to each other, there is spatial autocorrelation in the observations and the assumption does not hold. Thus it is necessary to test for spatial dependencies before regression. Through the study of a deformation data of a viaduct in Shanghai, China, we find that there exists significant spatial autocorrelation in horizontal and vertical directions, and the vertical deformations exhibit especially strong spatial association.