Book Image

Geospatial Data Science Quick Start Guide

By : Abdishakur Hassan, Jayakrishnan Vijayaraghavan
Book Image

Geospatial Data Science Quick Start Guide

By: Abdishakur Hassan, Jayakrishnan Vijayaraghavan

Overview of this book

Data scientists, who have access to vast data streams, are a bit myopic when it comes to intrinsic and extrinsic location-based data and are missing out on the intelligence it can provide to their models. This book demonstrates effective techniques for using the power of data science and geospatial intelligence to build effective, intelligent data models that make use of location-based data to give useful predictions and analyses. This book begins with a quick overview of the fundamentals of location-based data and how techniques such as Exploratory Data Analysis can be applied to it. We then delve into spatial operations such as computing distances, areas, extents, centroids, buffer polygons, intersecting geometries, geocoding, and more, which adds additional context to location data. Moving ahead, you will learn how to quickly build and deploy a geo-fencing system using Python. Lastly, you will learn how to leverage geospatial analysis techniques in popular recommendation systems such as collaborative filtering and location-based recommendations, and more. By the end of the book, you will be a rockstar when it comes to performing geospatial analysis with ease.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

K-means clustering

K-means clustering is one of the most widely used unsupervised machine learning techniques and is used mainly for data mining purposes. K-means is not particularly; exclusive to location data but is also used in diverse applications to partition observations into clusters (k). In a classic k-means clustering, the full weights are on attribute similarity, while location-based k-means specifically targets geographic coordinates to derive spatial or location similarity. We will use the latter as we are interested in location data analysis.

The k-means algorithm is based on randomly selecting k (where k is the number of clusters specified) number of objects that represent initially a cluster mean or center. Then, the algorithm assigns other objects to the cluster, which is closely based on the Euclidean distance between the object and cluster mean. The k-means...