Performing analytics on map data will reveal a lot of spatial patterns that would otherwise stay hidden. The API provides a lot of methods to elicit such information using advanced statistical queries on the data. Combine this with the intuitive data visualization methods provided by the API and you're one step nearer to becoming a map data scientist. We will be building a demographics analytic portal in this chapter by first trying to understand a few basic statistical concepts, and then by practically applying those in the code with the aid of the analytic and rendering modules provided by the API. Specifically we will be covering the following topics:
- Introduction to the demographics analytic portal we're going to develop
- Introduction to basic statistical measures
- Modules provided by the API to calculate the feature statistics
- A brief introduction to the classification methods
- Code-backed explanation for developing renderers with visual variables
- Performing multivariate mapping
- Performing automatic mapping using smart mapping
We are going to build a demographic analytic portal to demonstrate the advanced analytics capabilities of the API. Demographics refers to the classification of the population living in an area based on various socio-economic factors such as age, educational attainment, nationality, median household income, race, gender, and so on. The demographic data is mostly based on Census data and other reliable sources.
The demographics can be used to perform various analytics and is equally useful to government to make policy decisions and businesses to make marketing decisions. The power of demographic data lies in performing appropriate analytics such that we can extract useful information about the population living in an area in comparison to the ones surrounding it. Let's consider this URL, which provides detailed statistics on the median household income at block level—http://demographics5.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/USA_Demographics_and_Boundaries_2015/MapServer.
This map service shows the most updated 2015 demographic data for the USA. Among the hundreds of demographic parameters provided, we are interested in the median household income in the United States in 2015. Income amounts are expressed in current dollars, including an adjustment for inflation or cost-of-living increases. The median is the value that divides the distribution of household income into two equal parts. For more information on this map, including the terms of use, visit this URL: http://doc.arcgis.com/en/living-atlas/item/?itemId=6db428407492470b8db45edaa0de44c1&subType=demographics
These data are provided as a part of the Living Atlas endeavor of Esri. To use this data, you will require an ArcGIS Online organizational subscription or an ArcGIS Developer account. To access this item, you'll need to do one of the following:
- Sign in with an account that is a member of an organizational subscription
- Sign in with a developer account
- If you don't have an account, you can sign up for a free trial of ArcGIS or a free ArcGIS Developer account at this link: https://developers.arcgis.com/en/sign-up/