Applying Terrain analysis to human population?

Abstract—Terrain analysis methods are suitable to analysis datasets from a wide variety of statistical domains – not only digital elevation models. We applied a range of these to the total population dataset for Europe for the year 2011 to see the feasibility of identifying outliers, artefacts in the dataset as well as compare against more traditionally generated population derived datasets. The methods applied proved feasible and viable to identify corresponding regions for statistical purposes.