Diffusion-Based Density-Equalizing Maps: an Interdisciplinary Approach to Visualizing Homicide Rates and Other Georeferenced Statistical Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-inspired method for creating density-equalizing maps to visualize georeferenced statistical data, demonstrated with homicide rates in Brazil, offering a novel interdisciplinary visualization tool.

Contribution

It presents a new diffusion-based approach for density-equalizing map visualization, extending traditional methods with physics principles for better data representation.

Findings

Effective visualization of homicide rates in Brazil

Correlation analysis with other public data

Versatile application across multiple disciplines

Abstract

In every country, public and private agencies allocate extensive funding to collect large-scale statistical data, which in turn are studied and analyzed in order to determine local, regional, national, and international policies regarding all aspects relevant to the welfare of society. One important aspect of that process is the visualization of statistical data with embedded geographical information, which most often relies on archaic methods such as maps colored according to graded scales. In this work, we apply non-standard visualization techniques based on physical principles. We illustrate the method with recent statistics on homicide rates in Brazil and their correlation to other publicly available data. This physics-based approach provides a novel tool that can be used by interdisciplinary teams investigating statistics and model projections in a variety of fields such as economics and gross domestic product research, public health and epidemiology, socio-demographics, political science, business and marketing, and many others.