Non-linear regression models to identify functional forms of deforestation

Identification of limited number of factors shall provide comprehensive general understanding of deforestation at broad scale, as well as the projection for the future. Only two factors - human population and relief energy (difference of minimum altitude from the maximum in a sampled area) - were verified if they give sufficient elucidation of deforestation by a regression model, whose functional forms identified by linear combinations of dummy variables firstly explored with use of high-precision Japanese data. Likelihood with spatial dependency was derived and applied then to East-Asian data, with which our models systematically showed eminently good relative appropriateness to the real data.