An information theoretic approach to ecological inference in presence of spatial dependence

This paper introduces Information Theoretic – based methods for estimating a target variable in a set of small geographical areas, by exploring spatially heterogeneous relationships at the disaggregate level. Controlling for spatial effects means introducing models whereby the assumption is that values in adjacent geographic locations are linked to each other by means of some form of underlying spatial relationship. This method offers a flexible framework for modeling the underlying variation in sub-group indicators, by addressing the spatial dependency problem. A basic ecological inference problem, which allows for spatial heterogeneity and dependence, is presented with the aim of first estimating the model at the aggregate level, and then of employing the estimated coefficients to obtain the sub-group level indicators. The IT-based disaggregation procedure is applied to Italian data.