Search code examples
pythoncluster-analysisgeodjangopoints

GeoDjango: is there an out-of-the-box way to generate clusters of points?

I'm trying to compute clusters on a set of points in Python, using GeoDjango.

The problem: Given a set of points, output a set of clusters of those points. (i'm fine specifying # of clusters/cluster size/distance in advance to simplify)

There are a few solutions on the web to do clustering, so it's a well known problem. I thought that GeoDjango would handle these types of problems out of the box, but it's not clear how - I've searched the GeoDjango documentation, Google, and a few other places, but couldn't find anything.

Before I roll my own clustering solution, I thought I'd ask to see if there's a straightforward way to do this using GEOS or another package within GeoDjango.

Solution

  • As Christopher Schmidt mentioned, there doesn't seem to be any out of the box support for clustering in GeoDjango. However, if someone else runs into this issue, here's what I did:

    • Installed mlpy and numpy
    • Used the HCluster hierarchical clustering algorithm
    • Wrote a wrapper function to convert the GEOS Point objects into a matrix that mlpy could understand

    Documentation at: https://mlpy.fbk.eu/data/doc/clustering.html