Let’s answer it with Python and GeoPandas!

Some time ago I wrote an article, explaining how to work with geographic maps in Python, using the “hard way” (mainly Shapely and Pandas): Mapping Geography Data in Python. Now it is time to do it again, but this time, explaining how to do it in an easy way, using GeoPandas,  that can be understood as Pandas + Shapely at the same package.

Geopandas is an open source project to make working with geospatial data in Python easier. GeoPandas extends the datatypes used by Pandas to allow spatial operations on geometric types.

The motivation for this article was a recent project proposed by our professor Oscar Peredo and developed with my colleagues, Fran Gortari and Manuel Sacasa for the Big Data Analytics course of UDD’s (Universidad del Desarrollo) Data Science Master Degree.

The objective of that project was to explore the possibility of, taking advantage of state of the art Machine Learning Algorithms, to predict crash risk score for an urban grid, based on public car crash data from 2013 to 2018. By the other hand, the purpose of this article is simply to learn how to use GeoPandas,  on a real problem, answering a question:

“How safe are the streets in Santiago?”.

If you want to know what we have done with the proposed project for our DS Master deegre , please visit its GitHub repository.

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