Chapter 5. Answering Questions with Density Analysis

We often need to work with large and dense datasets in which there is a lot of overplotting and features experience significant overlap. Such datasets may be very slow at rendering because they contain thousands, or even millions, of features, and very difficult to interpret because overlaps make it difficult to detect any clusters or distribution patterns. In this chapter, you will learn the techniques that allow you to visualize such datasets in a more readable and faster way by displaying feature density instead of the features themselves. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to perform density analysis of your data and extract information from density maps.

In this chapter, we will go through the following topics:

• Density analysis and heat maps
• Creating heat maps with the Heatmap plugin
• Mapping density with a hexagonal grid