Resumen:
The brown rat lives with man in a wide variety of environmental contexts and adversely affects public health by transmission of diseases, bites, and allergies. Understanding behavioral and spatial correlation aspects of pest species can contribute to their effective management and control. Rat sightings can be described by spatial coordinates in a particular region of interest defining a spatial point pattern. In this paper, we investigate the spatial structure of rat sightings in the Latina district of Madrid (Spain) and its relation to a number of distance-based covariates that relate to the proliferation of rats. Given a number of locations, biologically considered as attractor points, the spatial dependence is modeled by distance-based covariates and angular orientations through copula functions. We build a particular spatial trivariate distribution using univariate margins coming from the covariate information and provide predictive distributions for such distances and angular orientations.
