Select Target Number of Points for Spatial Thinning — select_target

This function selects a specified number of points from a spatial dataset while maximizing the distance between selected points.

Usage

select_target_points(
  distance_matrix,
  target_points,
  thin_dist,
  trials,
  all_trials = FALSE
)

Arguments

distance_matrix: A matrix of pairwise distances between points.
target_points: An integer specifying the number of points to retain.
thin_dist: A positive numeric value representing the thinning distance in kilometers.
trials: A positive integer specifying the number of thinning trials to perform. Default is 10.
all_trials: A logical value indicating whether to return results of all attempts (`TRUE`) or only the best attempt with the most points retained (`FALSE`). Default is `FALSE`.

Value

A list of logical vectors indicating which points are kept in each trial if `all_trials` is `TRUE`; otherwise, a list with a single logical vector indicating the points kept in the best trial.

Examples

# Example distance matrix (3 points)
dist_matrix <- matrix(c(0, 2, 5,
                        2, 0, 3,
                        5, 3, 0), ncol = 3)

# Select 2 points maximizing distance
result <- select_target_points(dist_matrix, target_points = 2,
                              thin_dist = 4, trials = 5, all_trials = TRUE)