Given two point patterns X and Y on the same linear
network, this function finds, for each point of X,
the nearest point of Y, measuring distance by the shortest path
in the network. The distance between these points
is also computed.
The return value is a data frame, with rows corresponding to
the points of X. The first column gives the nearest neighbour
distances (i.e. the ith entry is the distance
from the ith point of X to the nearest element of
Y). The second column gives the indices of the nearest
neighbours (i.e.\ the ith entry is the index of
the nearest element in Y.)
If what="dist" then only the vector of distances is returned.
If what="which" then only the vector of indices is returned.
Note that this function is not symmetric in X and Y.
To find the nearest neighbour in X of each point in Y,
use nncross(Y,X).
The arguments iX and iY are used when
the two point patterns X and Y have some points in
common. In this situation nncross(X, Y) would return some zero
distances. To avoid this, attach a unique integer identifier to
each point, such that two points are identical if their
identifying numbers are equal. Let iX be the vector of
identifier values for the points in X, and iY
the vector of identifiers for points in Y. Then the code
will only compare two points if they have different values of the
identifier. See the Examples.
The kth nearest neighbour may be undefined, for example
if there are fewer than k+1 points in the dataset, or if
the linear network is not connected.
In this case, the kth nearest neighbour distance is infinite.