Creating a heat map of activity by assigning scores to a regular grid of points

[BrentonCrawford]

Hello,

I want to create an activity heat map for an area based on the number of activities that occur across the area.

I was thinking the best way would be to create a regular grid of points, and give each point a search radius, then somehow attribute the grid of points with a score based on the number of features in the search area and a weighting that will be assigned to each different type of dataset (e.g. points, lines and polygons)

I would love some advice on the best way to approach this, particularly what type of search could deal with with point lines and polygons, or even if a grid of points are the best to use or something different.

Or if this or something similar has already been done could you point me at it? I am quite new to ArcMap obviously so any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,

Brenton

[OllieBrown]

Hi Brenton,

Depending on the type of data you're looking to analyse I'd probably go for a fishnet grid in this instance. You can generate one using the tool in arc to cover your area of interest and also specify a resolution for the analysis by telling it how big you want each grid square to be, changing this will give wildly different results in some cases though choose one that you think best displays the relationships in the data.

Once you've created your fishnet grid you can then do a spatial join to your point features, this will output a count field in your fishnet attribute table that is the number of points that fall within each grid of the fishnet. You can then symbolise by the count field to arrive at the effect you're looking for.

Lines and polygons would be slightly different depending on what you're trying to acheive but it is something I've done before so I should be able to help with that too.

Hope this helps,

Ollie

[BrentonCrawford]

Thanks Ollie, that worked perfectly!

[OllieBrown]

No worries mate glad it helped, remember me when you're rich and / or famous.