Density of points

[chadhickman]

I have a couple point feature classes, where many of the points are fairly close to one another, does anyone have any good suggestions on how to calculate get the density/numbers of points within a specific area?

[DavidPike]

Hi Chad, you may want to search for Point Density and Kernel Density, they are similar but there are important differences between them.

If you want to use an aggregation method, I personally like to generate a grid of spatial bins, then count how many points are within each bin using the Spatial Join tool. Generate Tesselation is a great tool which can also produce a hexagonal grid of bins (Hexagons are the most complex regular shape that can be tessellated, and have equidistant centres to all their neighbours!).

[chadhickman]

Thanks for the response David! I have been experimenting with the Point Density tool but the raster output seems a little cumbersome to work with and I cannot seem to build and/or generate a attribute table for the data. I have attached a image of the points I am trying to create density for. 

 

[DavidPike]

Ah ok, those raster density outputs aren't really designed for attribution in a tabular form.

I'd highly recommend making that grid of hexagons (play about with the size you want) then do a spatial join based on those points.

[chadhickman]

Is there a specific tool that you use to create the Hexagons?

[DavidPike]

absolutely,

Generate Tessellation—Data Management toolbox | Documentation 

this may not be available on your version of arcmap if its quite old however. The fishnet tool would be useful if not.

[chadhickman]

Thanks I will experiment some and see what I can find out.