filter(str_detect(name, "Port*.+Poz"))
pol
Simple feature collection with 1 feature and 4 fields
Geometry type: POLYGON
Dimension: XY
Bounding box: xmin: 16.8004 ymin: 52.41373 xmax: 16.85458 ymax: 52.42736
Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
# A tibble: 1 × 5
osm_id code fclass name geometry
*
1 342024881 5651 airport Port Lotniczy Poznań-Ławica… ((16.8004 52.42494, 16.8…
Basic plotting
The following commands plot the data. Note that by default, R’s plot() method for {sf} objects creates a plot for each column in the data (up to 9 by default).
PythonR
pol.plot();
plot(pol)
The arguments needed to change the colour of the fill and border are different in R and Python, but the results are similar.
PythonR
pol.plot(color='none', edgecolor='black');
plot(st_geometry(pol), col = "white", border = "black")
Creating geographic data frames from a CSV file
The following commands create a geographic data frame from a CSV file. Note that two steps—creating the geometry column and combining it with the original table, hereby combined into one complex expression—are needed to convert a DataFrame to a GeoDataFrame in Python, whereas in R the sf::st_as_sf() function can be used to convert a data.frame to a spatial data frame directly.
PythonR
# Unzip the data.zip file:
with zipfile.ZipFile(f, 'r') as zip_ref:
zip_ref.extractall("data")
stops = pd.read_csv("data/gtfs/stops.txt")
stops = gpd.GeoDataFrame(
stops.drop(columns=['stop_lon', 'stop_lat', 'stop_code']),
geometry = gpd.points_from_xy(stops.stop_lon, stops.stop_lat),
crs = 4326)
stops
stop_id ... geometry
0 2186 ... POINT (17.04263 52.32684)
1 355 ... POINT (16.86888 52.46234)
2 4204 ... POINT (16.78629 52.47810)
3 3885 ... POINT (16.72401 52.47590)
4 494 ... POINT (16.93085 52.43616)
... ... ... ...
2916 2099 ... POINT (16.65026 52.47006)
2917 3915 ... POINT (16.98360 52.38233)
2918 3876 ... POINT (16.52949 52.49770)
2919 594 ... POINT (16.80900 52.43642)
2920 1190 ... POINT (16.99819 52.44124)
[2921 rows x 4 columns]
stops = read_csv("data/gtfs/stops.txt") |>
select(-stop_code) |>
st_as_sf(coords = c("stop_lon", "stop_lat"), crs = "EPSG:4326")
stops
Simple feature collection with 2921 features and 3 fields
Geometry type: POINT
Dimension: XY
Bounding box: xmin: 16.48119 ymin: 52.15166 xmax: 17.27693 ymax: 52.58723
Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
# A tibble: 2,921 × 4
stop_id stop_name zone_id geometry
*
1 2186 Żerniki/Skrzyżowanie B (17.04263 52.32684)
2 355 Sucholeska A (16.86888 52.46234)
3 4204 Pawłowicka A (16.78629 52.4781)
4 3885 Kobylniki/Karolewska B (16.72401 52.4759)
5 494 Połabska A (16.93085 52.43616)
6 2040 Tarnowo Pdg/Karolewo I C (16.68462 52.46915)
7 3736 Komorniki/Kryształowa B (16.78291 52.3478)
8 3932 Unii Lubelskiej A (16.9497 52.37239)
9 2795 Potasze/Jodłowa C (17.02994 52.52445)
10 3861 Miękowo/Stokrotkowa C (16.98954 52.49024)
# ℹ 2,911 more rows
Plotting attributes and layers
The following commands plot the bus stops loaded in the previous step. Note that the tmap package is hereby used in R to create these more advanced plots, as it also supports interactive mapping (see below).
PythonR
stops.plot(markersize=1, column='zone_id', legend=True);
tm_shape(stops) +
tm_symbols(size = 0.1, col = "zone_id")
We can add basic overlays in both languages as follows.
PythonR
base = stops.plot(markersize=0.1)
poi.plot(ax=base, color='red');
plot(stops$geometry, col = "grey", pch = 20, cex = 0.5)
plot(poi_sf$geometry, col = "red", add = TRUE)
Interactive plots
The following commands create interactive plots, in Python and R respectively. The Python code requires the folium and mapclassify packages, which are not installed by default when you install geopandas. Note that with tmap, you can use the same code to create static and interactive plots, by changing the tmap_mode().
PythonR
stops.explore(column='zone_id', legend=True, cmap='Dark2')
Make this Notebook Trusted to load map: File -> Trust Notebook
tmap_mode("view")
tm_shape(stops) +
tm_symbols(size = 0.1, col = "zone_id")
Reprojecting data
The following commands reproject the data to a local projected Coordinate Reference System (CRS).
PythonR
poi.crs
Name: WGS 84
Axis Info [ellipsoidal]:
- Lat[north]: Geodetic latitude (degree)
- Lon[east]: Geodetic longitude (degree)
Area of Use:
- name: World.
- bounds: (-180.0, -90.0, 180.0, 90.0)
Datum: World Geodetic System 1984 ensemble
- Ellipsoid: WGS 84
- Prime Meridian: Greenwich
poi_projected = poi.to_crs(2180)
stops_projected = stops.to_crs(2180)
st_crs(poi_sf)
Coordinate Reference System:
User input: EPSG:4326
wkt:
GEOGCRS["WGS 84",
ENSEMBLE["World Geodetic System 1984 ensemble",
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (Transit)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G730)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G873)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G1150)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G1674)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G1762)"],
MEMBER["World Geodetic System 1984 (G2139)"],
ELLIPSOID["WGS 84",6378137,298.257223563,
LENGTHUNIT["metre",1]],
ENSEMBLEACCURACY[2.0]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,
ANGLEUNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433]],
CS[ellipsoidal,2],
AXIS["geodetic latitude (Lat)",north,
ORDER[1],
ANGLEUNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433]],
AXIS["geodetic longitude (Lon)",east,
ORDER[2],
ANGLEUNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433]],
USAGE[
SCOPE["Horizontal component of 3D system."],
AREA["World."],
BBOX[-90,-180,90,180]],
ID["EPSG",4326]]
poi_projected = st_transform(poi_sf, 2180)
stops_projected = st_transform(stops, 2180)
Buffers
The following commands create buffers around the points. Note that R allows buffer to be created directly from a spatial data frame with geographic (lon/lot) coordinates thanks to its integration with Google’s S2 spherical geometry engine, as outlined in Geocomputation with R. For buffer operations to work in Python you must reproject the data first (which we did, see above) (although there are plans for geopandas to support a spherical geometry backend at some point, as discussed in issue #2098).
PythonR
To create a new vector layers named poi_buffer, in both languages, we can do the following.
poi_buffer = poi.copy()
poi_buffer.geometry = poi_projected.buffer(150).to_crs(4326)
poi_buffer = st_buffer(poi_sf, 150)
Calculating distances and areas
An interesting difference between R and Python is that the former uses the units package to store units, making it easy to convert between them, as outlined in the buffers section of the R lecture notes.
PythonR
poi_buffer.to_crs(2180).area
0 70572.341037
1 70572.341037
2 70572.341037
3 70572.341037
dtype: float64
st_area(poi_buffer)
Units: [m^2]
[1] 71656.68 71644.28 71656.92 71667.15
Spatial subsetting
Code to subset the bus stops within the buffered poi points is shown below. The R code is more concise because there is a special [ notation for the specific case of subsetting by intersection. In Python you must undertake the explicit steps, which are applicable to any predicate in both languages:
Take the unary union of the buffered points before subsetting
Create a boolean Series object with the .intersects or other method, and use the boolean Series to subset the data (rather than another geographic object)
PythonR
poi_union = poi_buffer.unary_union
sel = stops.intersects(poi_union)
stops_in_b = stops[sel]
stops_in_b
stop_id stop_name zone_id geometry
295 418 UAM Wydział Geografii A POINT (16.94108 52.46419)
681 467 Umultowska A POINT (16.92882 52.44426)
1724 468 Umultowska A POINT (16.93039 52.44307)
1861 417 UAM Wydział Geografii A POINT (16.94161 52.46530)
stops_in_b = stops[poi_buffer, ]
stops_in_b
Simple feature collection with 4 features and 3 fields
Geometry type: POINT
Dimension: XY
Bounding box: xmin: 16.92882 ymin: 52.44307 xmax: 16.94161 ymax: 52.4653
Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
# A tibble: 4 × 4
stop_id stop_name zone_id geometry
1 418 UAM Wydział Geografii A (16.94108 52.46419)
2 467 Umultowska A (16.92882 52.44426)
3 468 Umultowska A (16.93039 52.44307)
4 417 UAM Wydział Geografii A (16.94161 52.4653)
Spatial joins
Spatial joins are implemented with similar functions in R and Python and the outputs are the same. See the Python and R tutorials, and in Geocomputation with R Section 4.2.4 and Geocomputation with Python 3.3.4 for more details.
PythonR
poi_buffer.sjoin(stops, how='left')
name ... zone_id
0 Faculty ... A
0 Faculty ... A
1 Hotel ForZa ... NaN
2 Hotel Lechicka ... A
2 Hotel Lechicka ... A
3 FairPlayce ... NaN
[6 rows x 6 columns]
st_join(poi_buffer, stops)
Simple feature collection with 6 features and 4 fields
Geometry type: POLYGON
Dimension: XY
Bounding box: xmin: 16.92856 ymin: 52.44223 xmax: 16.95195 ymax: 52.46567
Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
# A tibble: 6 × 5
name geometry stop_id stop_name zone_id
*
1 Faculty ((16.93959 52.46441, 16.93957 52.464… 418 UAM Wydz… A
2 Faculty ((16.93959 52.46441, 16.93957 52.464… 417 UAM Wydz… A
3 Hotel ForZa ((16.94759 52.44224, 16.94762 52.442… NA
4 Hotel Lechicka ((16.93275 52.44435, 16.93275 52.444… 467 Umultows… A
5 Hotel Lechicka ((16.93275 52.44435, 16.93275 52.444… 468 Umultows… A
6 FairPlayce ((16.9477 52.461, 16.94765 52.46092,… NA
Questions and next steps
The code above shows that R and Python are similar in many ways. Differences include:
R’s package sf use of the S2 spherical geometry engine by default for lon/lat data, which can mean fewer lines of code for some operations (e.g. buffers)
The R package sf returns measures with units, which can make conversions easier, but which can also be confusing for new users
Python uses the ‘zip:’ syntax for virtual file system access, while R uses ‘/vsizip/’
Python has native support for interactive plotting with the .explore() method, while R requires an additional package such as tmap or mapview to create interactive plots
The above code is also a good example of how to create a reproducible workflow for geographic data analysis. We hope that it can also act a bit like a Rosetta Stone for those who are familiar with one language and want to learn the other.
It also raises some questions, which we leave unanswered for the community to consider and comment on:
Which language is more concise?
While there are slightly fewer lines of R code in the examples above, there may be ways to improve the Python code
Which language runs quicker?
It would be interesting to see benchmarks for the above code, perhaps in a future geocompx blog post or even a multi-language benchmarking package
Which language is quicker to write code in (the answer likely depends on your prior experience and tastes)?
We welcome input on these questions and any other comments on the above code, the source code of which can be found at github.com/geocompx/geocompx.org. If you would like to contribute, with ideas, comments, or additional questions, feel free to get in touch via the geocompx website, our Discord server, in a GitHub Discussion, on Mastodon or anywhere else.
Further reading
There is lots more to learn in this space. For more information, the following resources are recommended:
Geocomputation with R
Geocomputation with Python
Spatial Data Science with applications in R and Python, which provides R and Python code side-by-side
A great tutorial that simultaneously covers R and Python is Tools and packages to query and process Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data with R and Python by Lorena Abad.
Reusehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/CitationBibTeX citation:@online{lovelace2023,
author = {Lovelace, Robin and Graser, Anita and Dorman, Michael and
Nowosad, Jakub},
title = {Geographic Data Analysis in {R} and {Python:} Comparing Code
and Outputs for Vector Data},
date = {2023-08-30},
url = {https://geocompx.org//post/2023/ogh23},
langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Lovelace, Robin, Anita Graser, Michael Dorman, and Jakub Nowosad. 2023.
“Geographic Data Analysis in R and Python: Comparing Code and
Outputs for Vector Data.” August 30, 2023. https://geocompx.org//post/2023/ogh23.
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