Example of clustering on latitude and longitude
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)
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.
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