SANDAG Senior Research Analyst Mike Calandra sent us some traffic data updates for our Data As a Public Good report. I’m always thrilled when I get to communicate directly with agency analysts, and having them write to me is like an early Christmas. In our Data as a Public Good report several interviewees reported that … Read more
Here is some eye candy, a population density map of Pacific Beach and surrounding neighborhoods. This map was created with a lot of Python code, using the 2010 census shapefiles for census blocks, setting a value for each block as the population of the block divided by the area of the block, and rasterizing all … Read more
I’m spending the morning at Qualcomm for the Python Data Analysis Workshop, run by Dave Cook of the San Diego Python User group. I’m presenting about using Python to analyze crime and census data. If you like pretty pictures, the presentation has plenty of them: Analyzing Crime and Census Data Presentation.
We’ve released a new report, Municipal Open Data Policies. The best way to ensure that San Diego area nonprofits and citizens get useful data is for local governments to adopt Open Data policies. These policies, which have been implemented in many cities around the country, mandate that cities publish data. So, instead of fighting for months … Read more
Our first report, Data as a Public Good, assesses data requirements from over 20 civic and social organizations in the San Diego region and documents specific needs for municipal data. The report highlights the datasets that city governments control that would be most useful to the public if they were easily available. The report also discusses limits to … Read more
Here is a youtube channel of videos about data analysis. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they seem like an excellent introduction to data mining, hypothesis generation, prediction and other techniques. http://www.youtube.com/user/jtleek2007/videos Here is a video about what goes wrong with regression, which is often more than what goes right.
Our resident data slinger sent me an initial analysis of time series data for specific crime hot spots in San Diego, and the results are interesting. Rather than look at the whole of the region at once, we’ve identified specific high intensity areas, and are doing time-series analysis for them independently. The major areas are: North Park, … Read more
An earlier post commented on an XKCD cartoon that was related to a common misinterpretation of crime maps, and I’d noted that it would be interesting to find the difference between the maps, as we had done for violent and property crime. Some of us think about interesting things, and others do them, Paul Breed … Read more
On Wednesday March 6 we’ll kick off our Crime Data Analysis project, and before then, it may be worth asking “Why are a bunch of amateurs attempting what the police should be doing? ” The answer is that police departments analyze crime to catch criminals, and the Data Library analyzes crime to help residents understand their … Read more
Citizens of any skill level are invited to help us analyze crime in San Diego neighborhoods. Use your knowledge of the community or technical skill to create maps, discover anomalies, and better understand the causes and solutions to crime in San Diego. Come to the Kickoff meeting by signing up at Meetup.com Crime is always … Read more