How to make Inverse Distance Weighting result not border around outside points and more round.

[EricOstrowski]

Fairly new with arc. Using 10.2.2. Basically what I am trying to do is create a heat map using z scores ranging from 23 to 1322. I used IDW and got a sufficient result but it would look nicer if the results were more rounded or circular and did not just a square around the outer most points. Are there any other tools that give better looking results or are there any tricks to make this work that I am not aware of?

[DanPatterson_Retired]

more data points will improve things for all interpolators.  Making it look nice is less important than making it be right.

[EricOstrowski]

I could just zoom in on that section and make a better base map. I was just curious if there were other alternatives to interpolation that I was unaware of.

[curtvprice · Accepted solution]

There are a whole range of interpolators available to you. Natural Neighbors is a very easy to use interpolator - but it's more complicated than IDW.

IDW is very good because the algorithm is very simple, so it's very easy to understand and interpret the results.  If you think about how it works, I bet the artifacts you are seeing are easy to explain. An easy tweak to IDW is to modify the exponent parameter.

[EricOstrowski]

Thank you very much!