Global Moran's I — Measuring Overall Spatial Autocorrelation

Global Moran's I is the most widely used single-number summary of spatial autocorrelation across an entire study area. It compares the attribute value at each location with values at neighbouring locations using a spatial weights matrix, and returns a statistic ranging from −1 (perfect dispersion) through 0 (spatial randomness) to +1 (perfect clustering). A significance test determines whether the observed pattern is stronger than random chance.