Check out the journal article about OSMnx, which implements this technique.
A spatial index such as R-tree can drastically speed up GIS operations like intersections and joins. Spatial indices are key features of spatial databases like PostGIS, but they’re also available for DIY coding in Python. I’ll introduce how R-trees work and how to use them in Python and its geopandas library. All of my code is in this notebook in this urban data science GitHub repo.
A few months ago, I wrote about the large investments that U.S. universities are making in their football stadiums. This also included a visual analysis of stadium capacity around the country. Outside of North Korea, the 8 largest stadiums in the world are college football stadiums, and the 15 largest college football stadiums are larger than any NFL stadium.
I received a few comments interested in further analysis of the actual attendance of games held in these stadiums. While capacity is interesting because it represents an expectation and sustained investment by the school, attendance represents the utilization of that investment. My stadium capacity data covered every NCAA division I football stadium in the U.S. as of the 2015 college football season. So, I downloaded the NCAA’s 2015 home game attendance data to compare. My data, code, and analysis are in this GitHub repo. First, I visualized the FBS attendance figures themselves:
This is a summary of our JPER journal article (available here) about Craigslist rental listings’ insights into U.S. housing markets.
Rentals make up a significant portion of the U.S. housing market, but much of this market activity is poorly understood due to its informal characteristics and historically minimal data trail. The UC Berkeley Urban Analytics Lab collected, validated, and analyzed 11 million Craigslist rental listings to discover fine-grained patterns across metropolitan housing markets in the United States. I’ll summarize our findings below and explain the methodology at the bottom.
But first, 4 key takeaways:
Tools like WalkScore visualize how “walkable” a neighborhood is in terms of access to different amenities like parks, schools, or restaurants. It’s easy to create accessibility visualizations like these ad hoc with Python and its pandana library. Pandana (pandas for network analysis – developed by Fletcher Foti during his dissertation research here at UC Berkeley) performs fast accessibility queries over a network. I’ll demonstrate how to use it to visualize urban walkability. My code is in these IPython notebooks in this urban data science course GitHub repo.
First I give pandana a bounding box around Berkeley/Oakland in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then I load the street network and amenities from OpenStreetMap. In this example I’ll look at accessibility to restaurants, bars, and schools. But, you can create any basket of amenities that you are interested in – basically visualizing a personalized “AnythingScore” instead of a generic WalkScore for everyone. Finally I calculate and plot the distance from each node in the network to the nearest amenity:
I recently wrote about visualizing my Foursquare check-in history and mapping my Google location history, and it inspired me to mount a more substantial project: mapping everywhere I’ve ever been in my life (!!). I’ve got 4 years of Foursquare check-ins and Google location history data. For everything pre-smart phone, I typed up a simple spreadsheet of places I’d visited in the past and then geocoded it with the Google Maps API. All my Python and Leaflet code is available in this GitHub repo and is easy to re-purpose to visualize your own location history.
I’ll show the maps first, then run through the process I followed, below. First off, I used Python and matplotlib basemap to create this map of everywhere I’ve ever been:
I recently wrote about visualizing my Foursquare check-in history and it inspired me to map my entire Google location history data – about 1.2 million GPS coordinates from my Android phone between 2012 and 2016. I used Python and its pandas, matplotlib, and basemap libraries. The Python code is available in this notebook in this GitHub repo, and it’s simple to re-use to visualize your own location history.
Just download your JSON file from Google then run the code. First I load the JSON file and parse the latitude, longitude, and timestamp with pandas. Then I map my worldwide data set:
Last.fm is a web site that tracks your music listening history across devices (computer, phone, iPod, etc) and services (Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etc). I’ve been using Last.fm for nearly 10 years now, and my tracked listening history goes back even further when you consider all my pre-existing iTunes play counts that I scrobbled (ie, submitted to my Last.fm database) when I joined Last.fm.
Using Python, pandas, matplotlib, and leaflet, I downloaded my listening history from Last.fm’s API, analyzed and visualized the data, downloaded full artist details from the Musicbrainz API, then geocoded and mapped all the artists I’ve played. All of my code used to do this is available in this GitHub repo, and is easy to re-purpose for exploring your own Last.fm history. All you need is an API key.
First I visualized my most-played artists, above. Across the dataset, I have 279,769 scrobbles (aka, song plays). I’ve listened to 26,761 different artists and 66,377 different songs across 38,026 different albums from when I first started using iTunes circa 2005 through the present day. This includes pretty close to every song I’ve played on anything other than vinyl during that time.
I started using Foursquare at the end of 2012 and kept with it even after it became the pointless muck that is Swarm. Since I’ve now got 4 years of location history (ie, check-ins) data, I decided to visualize and map it with Python, matplotlib, and basemap. The code is available in this GitHub repo. It’s easy to re-purpose to visualize your own check-in history: you just need to plug in your Foursquare OAuth token then run the notebook.
First the notebook downloads all my check-ins from the Foursquare API. Then I mapped all of them, using matplotlib basemap.
A guide to setting up the Python scientific stack, well-suited for geospatial analysis, on a Raspberry Pi 3. The whole process takes just a few minutes.
The Raspberry Pi 3 was announced two weeks ago and presents a substantial step up in computational power over its predecessors. It can serve as a functional Wi-Fi connected Linux desktop computer, albeit underpowered. However it’s perfectly capable of running the Python scientific computing stack including Jupyter, pandas, matplotlib, scipy, scikit-learn, and OSMnx.
Despite (or because of?) its low power, it’s ideal for low-overhead and repetitive tasks that researchers and engineers often face, including geocoding, web scraping, scheduled API calls, or recurring statistical or spatial analyses (with small-ish data sets). It’s also a great way to set up a simple server or experiment with Linux. This guide is aimed at newcomers to the world of Raspberry Pi and Linux, but who have an interest in setting up a Python environment on these $35 credit card sized computers. We’ll run through everything you need to do to get started (if your Pi is already up and running, skip steps 1 and 2).
Google Takeout lets you download an archive of your data from various Google products. I downloaded my Gmail archive as an mbox file and visualized all of my personal Gmail account traffic since signing up back in July 2004. This analysis excludes work and school email traffic (as well as my other Gmail account for signing up for web sites and services), as I have separate dedicated email accounts for each. It also excludes the Hangouts/chats that Google includes in your mbox archive. So, this analysis just covers personal communication.
This also demonstrates working with time series in Python and pandas. All of my code is on GitHub as an IPython notebook. You can re-purpose it for your own inbox – just download your Gmail archive then run my code.
