Week 12: Tools for Final Projects

PPOL 6805 / DSAN 6750: GIS for Spatial Data Science
Fall 2024

Class Sessions
Author
Affiliation

Jeff Jacobs

Published

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

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Midterm Post-Mortem

  • On the one hand: You will be able to “complete” missed parts and receive credit for “completing” them!
  • On the other hand: You can also lean into spatial regression and use bonus HW to make up missed midterm points instead!

Choose Your Own Adventure

  • Bonus HW5A: Re-doing Midterm Q3-Q5 (with new dataset)
    • You’ve incurred “fixed cost” of understanding Q1-Q3…
    • \(\implies\) Build on this fixed cost and complete ~Q4 + ~Q5 without time limit!
  • Bonus HW5B: Spatial Regression
    • Your final project uses areal rather than point data…
    • \(\implies\) To prepare, do HW5B to learn/practice spatial regression and earn bonus points for doing so!

Final Project Details

  • Presentations: 6:30-9pm, Wed, 4 December, 2024
  • Reports: Due 5:59pm, Fri, 13 December, 2024

Presentation Setup

  • Each of your desks becomes a “table” at a GIS conference!
  • Everyone can go around and ask others about their projects 😻
  • Once I have grilled you on yours (~2-5mins), you are free to leave
  • But, FOOD \(\implies\) you can also stay!

Report Setup

  • GitHub repository (for your portfolio!)
    • GH Pages site: your_username.github.io/gis_project
  • …What do you put in that GitHub repository?
  • Quarto Manuscript
  • What do you put in the Quarto manuscript?
  • Writeup + Visualizations + Code, interspersed!
    • “Literate Programming” \(\implies\) Reproducible Results!

Immediately-Relevant Tools for Final Projects!

  • Research Methodology (Hypotheses)
  • Visualizing Spatial Data
  • Weighted Connection Matrices \(\mathbf{W}\)
  • Remote-Sensed / Raster Data
  • Data Anonymization / Synthetic Datasets

Research Methodology: Hypotheses

Social Science (McCourt):

Machine Learning (DSAN):

(Secretly My Opportunity to do More Spatial Regression!)

  • What explains previously-observed instances of separatist insurgencies?
  • Can we predict separatist insurgencies?
  • One (spatial) idea: how far away are [centers of power] from [regions of countervailing power]?
  • \(X\) = Distance from capital, \(Y\) = Insurgency
  • Unit of observation: Regions? Insurgent uprisings? Countries?

Operationalizing

  • The variables in previous slide are conceptual
  • Operationalizing = “Turning into measurable quantities”
  • \(X\) = MeanDistance(Capital, Insurgent Region), \(Y = \mathbf{1}[\text{Insurgency}]\)
  • Alternative:

\[ Y = \begin{cases} 2 &\text{if Successful Insurgency} \\ 1 &\text{if Failed Insurgency} \\ 0 &\text{if No Insurgency} \end{cases} \]

Connection Matrices

  • spdep
  • Neighbors if Centroids are close
  • Neighbors if Capitals are close
  • 🤔

Visualizing Spatial Data

  • My recommendation for final presentations: Leaflet

Remote-Sensed / Raster Data

  • You’ve seen (to some extent) terra
  • stars: Same group behind sf
  • Google solar panel data
  • .tif files: Dynamically loaded

Anonymization / Synthetic Datasets

  • Differential privacy
  • Used by the US Census(!) Since 2020

References