This case study - conducted as part of the ESRC grant The use of interactive electronic-books in the teaching and application of modern quantitative methods in the social sciences - was undertaken with the kind involvement of Martin Ralphs (@GoodPracticeMR).

An academic geographer by background, Martin is now Head of the UK Government Statistical Service’s (GSS) Good Practice Team in the Office for National Statistics. This case study concerns work Martin conducted with Kieran Martin (formerly of the ONS) investigating kernel smoothing techniques as a means of visualising crime data (see Martin and Ralphs (2013a) and Martin and Ralphs (2013b)).

Resources:

Please note that these resources are for demonstration purposes only; the eBook project explored a variety of media to document statistical resources and render aspects of them interactive, but these resources have not been exhaustively tested, and are not designed to be definitive.

• Smoothing crime data in R: a case study - this webpage we have prepared provides further background to the work, and describes the workflow Martin and Kieran employed to manipulate and visualise the crime data in R. The data used are licenced under the Open Government Licence, and are available for download from the following website: https://data.police.uk/.

Keywords:

• Open access data
• Data visualisation
• Smoothing
• Kernel density estimation
• Spatial data
• Crime
• R

References

Martin, K., and M. Ralphs. 2013a. “Using Kernel Methods to Visualise Crime Data.” http://2013.isiproceedings.org/Files/IPS017-P5-S.pdf.

Martin, K., and M. Ralphs. 2013b. “Using Kernel Methods to Visualise Crime Data.” http://www.iaos-isi.org/pdf/YSP/2013-1st-Martin,Ralphs.pdf.