Calculating the geographic dispersion of data

You can now determine the geographic center and central feature for a grouping of data. As you have seen, this can be a very powerful type of analysis. It can help you seek new locations, determine the focal point of a series of incidents, find the center of mass for a group of features, and more. But what if you need to know where the area of greatest concentration of features is, or how compact or spread out the data is around its geographic center? Such analysis can help you locate clusters of data or see shifts in behavior.

ArcGIS Pro’s Standard Distance tool, located in the Spatial Statistics Tools toolbox, and the Measuring Geographic Distributions toolset allow you to do this. It measures the compactness of a distribution around the mean center of a group of features. The smaller the distance calculated, the less the data is dispersed, meaning it is more compact. The larger the distance calculated, the more the data is...