blvim implements A. Wilson’s Boltzmann–Lotka–Volterra (BLV) interaction model. The model is described in Wilson, A. (2008), “Boltzmann, Lotka and Volterra and spatial structural evolution: an integrated methodology for some dynamical systems”, J. R. Soc. Interface, 5:865–871.

The package’s primary goal is to provide a fast implementation of the BLV model, complete with a collection of tools designed to explore the results through statistical summaries and graphical representations. The secondary goal is to facilitate the systematic assessment of how model parameters impact the results, again using summaries and graphical representations (see vignette("grid") for details on this aspect).

Installation

You can install blvim from CRAN with:

install.packages('blvim')

You can install the development version from R-universe with:

install.packages('blvim', repos = c('https://fabrice-rossi.r-universe.dev'))

Spatial interaction models

Spatial interaction models aim to estimate flows between locations, such as workers commuting from residential zones to employment zones. The blvim package focuses on the maximum entropy models developed by Alan Wilson. See vignette("theory") for the theoretical background.

In practice, if we have