Rectangular Statistical Cartograms in R: The recmap Package

TL;DR

The paper introduces the recmap R package that creates rectangular cartograms by resizing map regions according to statistical data, maintaining map recognizability and zero cartographic error.

Contribution

It presents an implementation of the RecMap algorithm in R with C++ optimization, demonstrating its application on real and synthetic maps.

Findings

Effective approximation of map regions by rectangles

Zero cartographic error achieved in cartogram creation

Integration with other statistical packages demonstrated

Abstract

Cartogram drawing is a technique for showing geography-related statistical information, such as demographic and epidemiological data. The idea is to distort a map by resizing its regions according to a statistical parameter by keeping the map recognizable. This article describes an R package implementing an algorithm called RecMap which approximates every map region by a rectangle where the area corresponds to the given statistical value (maintain zero cartographic error). The package implements the computationally intensive tasks in C++. This paper's contribution is that it demonstrates on real and synthetic maps how recmap can be used, how it is implemented and used with other statistical packages.