8.9 Regression with spatial autocorrelation

The following example is taken from Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and STAN, Second Edition by Richard McElreath, Copyright (2020) by Chapman and Hall/CRC. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. I strongly recommend reading this book, as you will find many good examples like this and very good explanations. The only caveat is that the book examples are in R/Stan, but don’t worry and keep sampling; you will find the Python/PyMC version of those examples in the https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc-resources resources.

For this example we have 10 different island societies; for each one of them, we have the number of tools they use. Some theories predict that larger populations develop and sustain more tools than smaller populations. Thus, we have a regression problem where the dependent variable is the number of tools and the independent variable is the population. Because the number of tools...