Normalizing Heat map by variable in a different dataset

Question

Hello Arc users,

I'm working on a heat map right now of a pedestrian vehicle crash dataset and I want to normalize it by population density. I'm new to ArcGIS Pro so I'm not sure if the weight field is the variable to normalize by but because the dataset of the heatmap does not have population I have to bring it in a separate dataset. What I want to know is how I can normalize the heatmap from a variable in a different dataset.

AndyAnderson · Answer

You should be able to create a new field and in it construct the GeoID from the census tract number. Look up how a FIPS code is defined: 13 = Georgia, 001= Appling County, with census tract it becomes 130019501 or some small variant thereof. Or you can go to Census.gov and download the population data yourself, it will come with the GeoID, and then you can join it to the census tract shapefile. Slightly out-of-date instructions here.

You can then do a spatial join of the census tract shapefile with its joined data to the crash locations, as described in the document I previously linked.

— Andy

ItsAnt · Answer

How would I go about joining the datasets if one does not have a common field to link. So the heatmap is of crash data that is georeferenced by lat long, then for population density I brought in a shapefile of census tracts that has the GeoID and the individual numbers that comprise it which is the second dataset a shapefile but the third dataset (an excel file) census tract population dataset does not have a GeoID, besides the census tract number it just displays the name (Census Tract 9501, Appling County, Georgia) instead of 13127999501

AndyAnderson · Answer

Standard procedure is to “join” the separate dataset to the mapped dataset.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/2.9/help/data/tables/joins-and-relates.htm

—— Andy