Fill missing values by interpolation or other procedure?

Question

Hello,

I have municipalities (preferred as polygons, but point features also possible) with "journey time" from a central location as a continous metric attribute. For about 5 percent of the municipalities the attribute value is missing and I want to automatically generate a value for these features.

I have tried interpolation with inverse distance weighting which produces good results as raster data. However, I haven't figured out how to get values from the raster transferred into the original polygon or point features' attributes.

Now my questions are:
- How can I transfer values from raster data into (given) point or polygon features?
- Is there solution other than interpolation which is more practical? For example, it would be sufficient to generate an average value from all bordering polygons or points within a certain distance.

Thank you for your help!
Regards,
Alex

AileenBuckley · Answer

Since you are prompted to skip features with no values, I don't think you actually have to create a definition query first. Simply respond Yes to the prompt instead.

AlexanderVeser · Answer

Dear Jay,

thank you for the hint - it works well for point features and does exactly what I wanted!

I have also figured out how calculate missing values for polygon features using the geostatistical wizard option "areal interpolation" (see http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#/What_is_areal_interpolation/0031000000q8000000/):

When extracting values from polygon features for the same set of polygon features with the geostatistical wizard, the rows with missing values must be excluded in the calculation of the areal interpolation raster (for example via a definition query "value is not null"). Otherwise, the rows which originally had null values will again receive null values when the values of the areal interpolation raster are applied to the original polygon features.

Cheers,
Alex

JaysenGaines · Answer

Alex,

You can try "Extract Multi Values to Point" in the spatial analyst toolbox. This will populate a field in the point attribute table with the corresponding cell value from one or more raster sets. Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but at least it will get values from a raster into a vector point feature class.

Hope this helps,
Jay