How do I create a density or heat map of my locations?

Density grids are a powerful tool that you can leverage to visualize your data. For example, it can be useful for showing hot spots of crime, mapping the concentration of healthcare providers, and analyzing the pattern of clients around a store weighted by the cost of their purchases. This article shows you how to work with the Density/Heat Layer tool in Maptitude:

The steps below show how to create a density map of the concentration of hospitals, but you can use any point layer (such as customers or crime locations) as the basis for your map.

1. Download the free healthcare data layer here: https://www2.caliper.com/store/product/health-care-mapping-data/
2. Use the Create a United States Map option from the Home Window to create a map of any U.S. county (e.g., Los Angeles CA, Cook IL, Harris TX).
3. Click  on the Standard toolbar and add the Hospital layer (ccHospital.cdf) that you downloaded in step 1 to your map.
4. Choose Tools>Analysis>Density/Heat Layer or click  on the Standard toolbar.
5. Choose Hospital from the Layer drop-down list and choose Visible Features from the Set drop-down list.
   Note: You are going to create a heat map showing the density of all hospitals in the county.
   If you wanted, you could focus on a subset of the hospitals by using a selection set.
   For a video tutorial on selection sets, see: https://www.caliper.com/learning/media/working-with-maptitude-selection-sets-filters/.
6. Enter a name for the density grid layer, such as "Hospital Density," in the Layer Name edit box and click OK.
   

Maptitude computes the density grid and adds it to the map. The density at any location can be visualized by the color of the shading - usually blue to red for low to high density.

For a video tutorial on density grids, see: https://www.caliper.com/learning/media/creating-a-maptitude-hot-spot-density-grid-map/

For a tutorial on changing the color of your density grids, see: https://www.caliper.com/learning/articles/how-do-i-change-the-color-of-density-grids/

For an example geographic analysis making use of density grids, see: https://www.caliper.com/learning/articles/what-kinds-of-comparison-analysis-can-i-do-for-two-groups-of-locations/