{"entity":{"id":"spatial-autocorrelation","kind":"term","name":"Spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I)","aka":["spatial autocorrelation","Moran's I","Morans I","spatially autocorrelated","spatial domain","spatial domains"],"tldr":"Spatial autocorrelation means that nearby spots in a tissue section tend to have similar values; Moran's I is the standard number for how strong that tendency is.","summary":"Moran's I is a measure of spatial autocorrelation, the correlation of a signal among nearby locations in space, developed by P. A. P. Moran (Wikipedia). Values near +1 mean neighbouring spots agree, near 0 no spatial pattern, and a permutation test gives the p-value. In spatial transcriptomics it is used to show that predicted risk, subtype or expression forms coherent domains rather than noise, and methods such as SpaGCN build the neighbourhood structure into clustering.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moran's_I","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moran's_I"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["spatial-transcriptomics"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["permutation-test","spagcn"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/spatial-autocorrelation."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Pathology"},"route":"/terms/spatial-autocorrelation/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"permutation-test","kind":"term","name":"Permutation test and the Mann-Whitney U test","route":"/terms/permutation-test/"},{"id":"spatial-transcriptomics-platforms","kind":"term","name":"Spatial transcriptomics platforms (Visium HD, Xenium, MERFISH, CosMx, CODEX)","route":"/terms/spatial-transcriptomics-platforms/"},{"id":"spagcn","kind":"term","name":"Spatially aware clustering (SpaGCN, KNN smoothing)","route":"/terms/spagcn/"}],"technology":[{"id":"spatial-transcriptomics","kind":"technology","name":"Spatial transcriptomics","route":"/technologies/spatial-transcriptomics/"}]}}