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Data Visualisation Guide

Hexbin maps

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Maps

Just like overplotted scatter plots can be summarised with binned scatter plots, a map with a lot of points can be summarised by creating a grid and counting how many points fall into each grid.

The used grid could consist of squares, but usually hexagons are used because they cover the plane in a nicer way. The hexbin map below shows the density of farmer markets in the US.

A map of the United States covered with hexagons, the colour of the hexagons shows the number of farmer markets in each hexagon

Source: d3-hexgrid

When the number of points in each hexagon is used to scale the hexagons in size, their colour can be used to encode a secondary variable. In the hexbin map below the hexagons are scaled according to how many Walmart stores they contain, and the colour of each hexagon represent the median opening year of the stores it contains.

A hexbin map showing the median opening year of the Walmart stores in each hexagon. The size of each hexagon is proportional to the number of stores in each hexagon

Source: observablehq.com/@d3

Related pages

Choropleth maps

Scaled symbol maps

Cartograms

Dot maps

Flow maps

Data dense time series

Maps