'treeSS' - Tree-spatial scan statistics in R

treeSS - Tree-spatial scan statistics in R

I am happy to share treeSS, a new R package now available on CRAN.

It helps you detect a special kind of cluster in your data: spatial clusters, meaning groups of nearby areas where something happens more often than expected. But it does one extra thing. It looks at where something happens (space) and what kind of thing happens (a category in a tree/hierarchy) at the same time. This is an advance over spatial-only or tree-only algorithms, and it does so without inflating the family-wise error rate.

For example, you can use it to find which specific cause of death, type of crime, accident, or condition is unusually common in a group of nearby areas.

The method, called the tree-spatial scan statistic, comes from our paper:

Cançado, A. L. F., Oliveira, G. S., Quadros, A. V. C., & Duczmal, L. H. (2025). A tree-spatial scan statistic. Environmental and Ecological Statistics, 32(3), 953-978. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-025-00670-w

Try it in R:

install.packages("treeSS")

A Python version is coming soon to PyPI.

• CRAN version: https://cran.r-project.org/package=treeSS
• Dev version: https://github.com/allanvc/treeSS
• Article: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-025-00670-w