Example of clustering on latitude and longitude

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Updates 2025/05/30

This note is a list of DOs and DON’Ts for conducting (spatial) clustering analysis. The examples are reproductions of student submissions.

DON’Ts

Clustering on longitude and latitude of points (without using other features & no justification)

image-20240530111903273

What it is: This is the k-means clustering of crime incidents based on longitude and latitude, which leads to the selection of 10 boroughs for further analysis.

Comments: The student justify using these 10 boroughs by clustering latitude and longitude coordinates, which is obviously going to cluster neighbouring boroughs and is not valid evidence for high-crime regions. If the objective is to identify high-crime boroughs, using the crime density (number of crimes per square km or per 1000 residents) would be more appropriate than clustering.

Comments