中文摘要：

利用统计学方法研究社会经济与自然等要素的地理空间分布在最近几十年来已引起许多学者的关注．地理空间分布的整体性就像它的局部性一样．是空间统计分析的主要对象。本文目的是综述各种地理空间分布整体性特征的统计研究进展。在这里，地理空间分布的整体性特征是指它在二维空间上的中心和方位以及它自身的地理范围、空间密集度和形状。文中介绍了对这些整体性特征进行统计描述、预测和估计的方法。已有近20个空间统计指标用于描述社会经济和自然地理空间分布的各种整体性特征，分析和预测它们的时空演化过程，如空间移动、扩张、加密、旋转，并确定不同空间分布的相关关系。文中探讨了地理空间分布整体统计目前存在的主要科学问题．如空间独立性假设、空间随机抽样、时空过程分析（包括时空稳态随机过程）、空间统计描述方法和空间分布函数等。

英文摘要：

The past five decades have witnessed increasing interest in the statistical analysis of spatial distribution, whose local and global characteristics are major concerns among geographers, statisticians, and spatial analysts. The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the global statistics of spatial distribution, the methods that describe, estimate, and predict the overall characteristics of spatial distribution as an independent field of research. The global characteristics of a spatial distribution include its center （or eentroid）, range, intensity, orientation, and shape in 2- D space. About 20 spatial statistical indices are proposed and employed to identify those global characteristics and their changes （or spatiotemporal processes） for a variety of spatial distributions, socioeconomic or natural, and to examine the relationships between different spatial distributions. The fundamental issues of this field that are discussed include spatial independence assumption, spatial random sampling, spatiotemporal process, spatiotemporal stationary stochastic process, spatial descriptive statistics and spatial probabilistic functions.