Using GeoPandas for Spatial Visualization

Taking Your Data Into the Real World

Paul Torres
Towards Data Science

Photo by vilmosv on Freepik

Recently, I was working on a project where I was trying to build a model that could predict housing prices in King County, Washington — the area that surrounds Seattle. After looking at the features, I wanted a way to determine the houses’ worth based on location.

The dataset included latitude and longitude and it was easy to google them to take a look at the houses, their neighborhoods, their distance from the water, etc. But with over 17000 observations, that was a fool’s task. I had to find an easier way.

I had used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) only once before but not in Python. So I did what I do best: I googled, and ran into this amazing package called GeoPandas. I am going to let the GeoPandas team sum up what they do because they can say much better than I can.

GeoPandas is an open source project to make working with geospatial data in python easier. GeoPandas extends the datatypes used by pandas to allow spatial operations on geometric types. Geometric operations are performed by shapely. GeoPandas further depends on fiona for file access and descartes and matplotlib for plotting. — Description from GeoPandas Website (2020)

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