Ask your data
  • Blog
  • About & Contact

Where the donors are

3/5/2017

1 Comment

 
BildVaranasi, India
Sometimes maps are a suitable mean or even necessary tool to visualize data. A vast number of software is available for what is often termed location intelligence. Renowned applications like ArcGIS from Esri, the tools from Pitney Bowes or Tableau are powerful - but are of course not available for free. If creating maps is not really an essential part of the analytics you do on a regular basis but maps are the tool of choice once in a while, there is a number of alternatives one can look at.


Good old MS Excel includes a functionality to visualize map data since version 2016. As soon as the data is ready in Excel (I used data from Statistics Austria for population on postcode level) it is fairly easy to create different types of plots. The picture shows a heat map (i.e. the closer an area is to red, the higher it is populated).​

Bild
Bild

I also came across a cloud-based platform called Carto. It took me some hours to get used to the handling of base data and map styling. After a while it got easier and easier, looking backwards it is a straightforward and intuitive tool. I used data from Destatis (the German equivalent to Statistics Austria) to obtain population data on federal province level. The nice thing is that generated maps can be published and embedded online which I have done here.


Last, not least there is a number of R packages available that aim to make the data scientist´s life easier when it comes to spatial data. The package ggmap which is a package for creating maps with ggplot2 (the plotting workhorse of R) is worth mentioning in this context. I also found leaflet, which brings open-source JavaScript libraries particularly interesting (see pciture below on the right). It is actually also possible to do some basic plotting without any further ado using R “standard” (see left map).

Bild
Bild
​There are also country-specific map packages around. A very nice example I have found
is from Italy and plots the number of wineries per region (and made me think when the next trip to Italy might be :-)
Bild
If you are interested in R Code or how-to-information, please do not hesitate to get back. I´d also look forward to shared experiences with mapping tools, spatial data etc. Just go ahead and comment :-)!
1 Comment
Ktecv2000 link
10/22/2023 03:27:00 am

Hello matee great blog post

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies

    Categories

    All
    Artificial Intelligence
    Attribution Modelling
    Because It´s Fun!
    Churn
    Clustering
    Data Sciene @NPO
    Data Strategy
    Data Visualization
    Ethical AI
    Facebook
    Machine Learning
    Maps
    Marketing Mix Modelling
    Natural Language Processing
    Neural Nets
    Next Best Action
    Power BI
    Predictive Analytics
    Recommender Systems
    Segmentation
    Social Media
    Time Series
    Trends
    Twitter

    Archive

    December 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    June 2024
    December 2023
    August 2023
    March 2023
    January 2023
    October 2022
    August 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

About

Copyright © 2018
  • Blog
  • About & Contact