This summer, I had the honor to — once again — speak at the OpenGeoHub Summer School. This time, I wanted to challenge the students and myself by not just doing MovingPandas but by introducing both MovingPandas and DVC for Mobility Data Science.

I’ve previously written about DVC and how it may be used to track geoprocessing workflows with QGIS & DVC. In my summer school session, we go into details on how to use DVC to keep track of MovingPandas movement data analytics workflow.

Here is the recording of the session live stream and you can find the materials at https://github.com/movingpandas/movingpandas-examples/blob/opengeohub2023/README.md

Today, I want to point out a blog post over at

https://geocompx.org/post/2023/ogh23/

written together with my fellow “Geocomputation with Python” co-authors Robin Lovelace, Michael Dorman, and Jakub Nowosad.

In this blog post, we talk about our experience teaching R and Python for geocomputation. The context of this blog post is the OpenGeoHub Summer School 2023 which has courses on R, Python and Julia. The focus of the blog post is on geographic vector data, meaning points, lines, polygons (and their ‘multi’ variants) and the attributes associated with them. We plan to cover raster data in a future post.

Kaggle’s “Taxi Trajectory Data from ECML/PKDD 15: Taxi Trip Time Prediction (II) Competition” is one of the most used mobility / vehicle trajectory datasets in computer science. However, in contrast to other similar datasets, Kaggle’s taxi trajectories are provided in a format that is not readily usable in MovingPandas since the spatiotemporal information is provided as:

• TIMESTAMP: (integer) Unix Timestamp (in seconds). It identifies the trip’s start;
• POLYLINE: (String): It contains a list of GPS coordinates (i.e. WGS84 format) mapped as a string. The beginning and the end of the string are identified with brackets (i.e. [ and ], respectively). Each pair of coordinates is also identified by the same brackets as [LONGITUDE, LATITUDE]. This list contains one pair of coordinates for each 15 seconds of trip. The last list item corresponds to the trip’s destination while the first one represents its start;

Therefore, we need to create a DataFrame with one point + timestamp per row before we can use MovingPandas to create Trajectories and analyze them.

But first things first. Let’s download the dataset:

import datetime
import pandas as pd
import geopandas as gpd
import movingpandas as mpd
import opendatasets as od
from os.path import exists
from shapely.geometry import Point

input_file_path = 'taxi-trajectory/train.csv'

def get_porto_taxi_from_kaggle():
    if not exists(input_file_path):
        od.download("https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/crailtap/taxi-trajectory")

get_porto_taxi_from_kaggle()
df = pd.read_csv(input_file_path, nrows=10, usecols=['TRIP_ID', 'TAXI_ID', 'TIMESTAMP', 'MISSING_DATA', 'POLYLINE'])
df.POLYLINE = df.POLYLINE.apply(eval)  # string to list
df

And now for the remodelling:

def unixtime_to_datetime(unix_time):
    return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_time)

def compute_datetime(row):
    unix_time = row['TIMESTAMP']
    offset = row['running_number'] * datetime.timedelta(seconds=15)
    return unixtime_to_datetime(unix_time) + offset

def create_point(xy):
    try: 
        return Point(xy)
    except TypeError:  # when there are nan values in the input data
        return None
 
new_df = df.explode('POLYLINE')
new_df['geometry'] = new_df['POLYLINE'].apply(create_point)
new_df['running_number'] = new_df.groupby('TRIP_ID').cumcount()
new_df['datetime'] = new_df.apply(compute_datetime, axis=1)
new_df.drop(columns=['POLYLINE', 'TIMESTAMP', 'running_number'], inplace=True)
new_df

And that’s it. Now we can create the trajectories:

trajs = mpd.TrajectoryCollection(
    gpd.GeoDataFrame(new_df, crs=4326), 
    traj_id_col='TRIP_ID', obj_id_col='TAXI_ID', t='datetime')
trajs.hvplot(title='Kaggle Taxi Trajectory Data', tiles='CartoLight')

That’s it. Now our MovingPandas.TrajectoryCollection is ready for further analysis.

By the way, the plot above illustrates a new feature in the recent MovingPandas 0.16 release which, among other features, introduced plots with arrow markers that show the movement direction. Other new features include a completely new custom distance, speed, and acceleration unit support. This means that, for example, instead of always getting speed in meters per second, you can now specify your desired output units, including km/h, mph, or nm/h (knots).

This post is part of a series. Read more about movement data in GIS.

The QGIS conda packages have been around for a while. One of their use cases, for example, is to allow Linux users to easily install multiple versions of QGIS.

Similarly, we’ve seen posts on using PyQGIS in Jupyter notebooks. However, I find the setup with *.bat files rather tricky.

This post presents a way to set up a conda environment with QGIS that is ready to be used in Jupyter notebooks.

The first steps are to create a new environment and install QGIS. I use mamba for the installation step because it is faster than conda but you can use conda as well:

(base) PS C:\Users\anita> conda create -n qgis python=3.9
(base) PS C:\Users\anita> conda activate qgis
(qgis) PS C:\Users\anita> mamba install -c conda-forge qgis=3.28.2 
(qgis) PS C:\Users\anita> qgis

If we now try to import the qgis module in Python, we get an error:

(qgis) PS C:\Users\anita> python
Python 3.9.15 | packaged by conda-forge | (main, Nov 22 2022, 08:41:22) [MSC v.1929 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import qgis
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'qgis'

To fix this error, we need to get the paths from the Python console inside QGIS:

import sys
sys.path
['H:/miniconda3/envs/qgis/Library/./python', 'C:/Users/anita/AppData/Roaming/QGIS/QGIS3\\profiles\\default/python', ... ]

This list of paths can be configured as the defaults for our qgis environment using conda develop:

(qgis) PS C:\Users\anita> conda activate base
(base) PS C:\Users\anita> mamba install conda-build -c conda-forge
(base) PS C:\Users\anita> conda develop -n qgis [list of paths from qgis python console] 

With this setup, the import should now work without errors:

(base) PS C:\Users\anita> conda activate qgis
(qgis) PS C:\Users\anita> python
Python 3.9.15 | packaged by conda-forge | (main, Nov 22 2022, 08:41:22) [MSC v.1929 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import qgis

The example Jupyter notebook covers running a QGIS Processing algorithm and visualizing the results in the notebook using GeoPandas:

Head over to Github to find the full instructions: https://github.com/anitagraser/QGIS-resources/blob/master/qgis3/notebooks/hello-world.ipynb

The latest v0.11 release is now available from conda-forge.

This release contains some really cool new algorithms:

• New minimum and Hausdorff distance measures #37
• New functions to add a timedelta column and get the trajectory sampling interval #233 

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

The new distance measures are covered in tutorial #11:

But don’t miss the great features covered by the other notebooks, such as outlier cleaning and smoothing:

If you have questions about using MovingPandas or just want to discuss new ideas, you’re welcome to join our discussion forum.

The latest v0.10 release is now available from conda-forge.

This release contains some really cool new algorithms:

• First initial MovingFeatures JSON (MF-JSON) support
• Improved handling of local non-geographic coordinates, incl a new tutorial on this topic
• Speed and direction column names can now be customized

If you have questions about using MovingPandas or just want to discuss new ideas, you’re welcome to join our recently opened discussion forum.

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

Besides others examples, the movingpandas-examples repo contains the following tech demo: an interactive app built with Panel that demonstrates different MovingPandas stop detection parameters

To start the app, open the stopdetection-app.ipynb notebook and press the green Panel button in the Jupyter Lab toolbar:

This post aims to show you how to create quick interactive apps for prototyping and data exploration using Panel.

Specifically, the following example demos how to add geocoding functionality based on Geopy and Nominatim. As such, this example brings together tools we’ve previously touched on in Super-quick interactive data & parameter exploration and Geocoding with Geopy.

Here’s a quick preview of the resulting app in action:

To create this app, I defined a single function called my_plot which takes the address and desired buffer size as input parameters. Using Panel’s interact and servable methods, I’m then turning this function into the interactive app you’ve seen above:

import panel as pn
from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim
from utils.converting import location_to_gdf
from utils.plotting import hvplot_with_buffer

locator = Nominatim(user_agent="OGD.AT-Lab")

def my_plot(user_input="Giefinggasse 2, 1210 Wien", buffer_meters=1000):
    location = locator.geocode(user_input)
    geocoded_gdf = location_to_gdf(location, user_input)
    map_plot = hvplot_with_buffer(geocoded_gdf, buffer_meters, 
                                  title=f'Geocoded address with {buffer_meters}m buffer')
    return map_plot.opts(active_tools=['wheel_zoom']) 

kw = dict(user_input="Giefinggasse 2, 1210 Wien", buffer_meters=(0,10000))

pn.template.FastListTemplate(
    site="Panel", title="Geocoding Demo", 
    main=[pn.interact(my_plot, **kw)]
).servable();

You can find the full notebook in the OGD.AT Lab repository or run this notebook directly on MyBinder:

To open the Panel preview, press the green Panel button in the Jupyter Lab toolbar:

I really enjoy building spatial data exploration apps this way, because I can start off with a Jupyter notebook and – once I’m happy with the functionality – turn it into a pretty app that provides a user-friendly exterior and hides the underlying complexity that might scare away stakeholders.

Give it a try and share your own adventures. I’d love to see what you come up with.

Many of you certainly have already heard of and/or even used Leafmap by Qiusheng Wu.

Leafmap is a Python package for interactive spatial analysis with minimal coding in Jupyter environments. It provides interactive maps based on folium and ipyleaflet, spatial analysis functions using WhiteboxTools and whiteboxgui, and additional GUI elements based on ipywidgets.

This way, Leafmap achieves a look and feel that is reminiscent of a desktop GIS:

Recently, Qiusheng has started an additional project: the geospatial meta package which brings together a variety of different Python packages for geospatial analysis. As such, the main goals of geospatial are to make it easier to discover and use the diverse packages that make up the spatial Python ecosystem.

Besides the usual suspects, such as GeoPandas and of course Leafmap, one of the packages included in geospatial is MovingPandas. Thanks, Qiusheng!

I’ve tested the mamba install today and am very happy with how this worked out. There is just one small hiccup currently, which is related to an upstream jinja2 issue. After installing geospatial, I therefore downgraded jinja:

mamba install -c conda-forge geospatial 
mamba install -c conda-forge jinja2=3.0

Of course, I had to try Leafmap and MovingPandas in action together. Therefore, I fired up one of the MovingPandas example notebook (here the example on clipping trajectories using polygons). As you can see, the integration is pretty smooth since Leafmap already support drawing GeoPandas GeoDataFrames and MovingPandas can convert trajectories to GeoDataFrames (both lines and points):

Geospatial also includes the new dask-geopandas library which I’m very much looking forward to trying out next.

MovingPandas 0.9rc3 has just been released, including important fixes for local coordinate support. Sports analytics is just one example of movement data analysis that uses local rather than geographic coordinates.

Many movement data sources – such as soccer players’ movements extracted from video footage – use local reference systems. This means that x and y represent positions within an arbitrary frame, such as a soccer field.

Since Geopandas and GeoViews support handling and plotting local coordinates just fine, there is nothing stopping us from applying all MovingPandas functionality to this data. For example, to visualize the movement speed of players:

Of course, we can also plot other trajectory attributes, such as the team affiliation.

But one particularly useful feature is the ability to use custom background images, for example, to show the soccer field layout:

To access the full example notebook, visit: https://github.com/anitagraser/movingpandas/blob/master/tutorials/5-local-coordinates.ipynb

An update to the MovingPandas examples repository will follow shortly.

The latest v0.9 release is now available from conda-forge.

This release contains some really cool new algorithms:

• Trajectory smoothing (Kalman filter)
• Spatiotemporal trajectory generalization (Top-Down Time Ratio)
• Trajectory cleaning (statistical outliers in numerical columns)

These new algorithms were contributed by Lyudmil Vladimirov and George S. Theodoropoulos.

Behind the scenes, Ray Bell took care of moving testing from Travis to Github Actions, and together we worked through the steps to ensure that the source code is now properly linted using flake8 and black.

Being able to work with so many awesome contributors has made this release really special for me. It’s great to see the project attracting more developer interest.

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

The latest v0.8 release is now available from conda-forge.

New features include:

• More convenient creation of TrajectoryCollection objects from (Geo)DataFrames (#137)
• Support for different geometry column names (#112)

Last week, I also had the pleasure to speak about MovingPandas at Carto’s Spatial Data Science Conference SDSC21:

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

The latest v0.7 release is now available from conda-forge.

New features include:

• Functions to convert Trajectories to GeoDataFrames (points, line segments, or whole trajectories)
• Clip and intersection now return TrajectoryCollection objects

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

After writing “Towards a template for exploring movement data” last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to develop a solid approach for movement data exploration that would help analysts and scientists to better understand their datasets. Finally, my search led me to the excellent paper “A protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems” by Zuur et al. (2010). What they had done for the analysis of common ecological datasets was very close to what I was trying to achieve for movement data. I followed Zuur et al.’s approach of a exploratory data analysis (EDA) protocol and combined it with a typology of movement data quality problems building on Andrienko et al. (2016). Finally, I brought it all together in a Jupyter notebook implementation which you can now find on Github.

There are two options for running the notebook:

1. The repo contains a Dockerfile you can use to spin up a container including all necessary datasets and a fitting Python environment.
2. Alternatively, you can download the datasets manually and set up the Python environment using the provided environment.yml file.

The dataset contains over 10 million location records. Most visualizations are based on Holoviz Datashader with a sprinkling of MovingPandas for visualizing individual trajectories.

Point density map of 10 million location records, visualized using Datashader

Line density map for detecting gaps in tracks, visualized using Datashader

Example trajectory with strong jitter, visualized using MovingPandas & GeoViews

I hope this reference implementation will provide a starting point for many others who are working with movement data and who want to structure their data exploration workflow.

If you want to dive deeper, here’s the paper:

[1] Graser, A. (2021). An exploratory data analysis protocol for identifying problems in continuous movement data. Journal of Location Based Services. doi:10.1080/17489725.2021.1900612.

(If you don’t have institutional access to the journal, the publisher provides 50 free copies using this link. Once those are used up, just leave a comment below and I can email you a copy.)

References

• Zuur, A. F., Ieno, E. N., & Elphick, C. S. (2010). A protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems. Methods in ecology and evolution, 1(1), 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2009.00001.x.
• Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., & Fuchs, G. (2016). Understanding movement data quality. Journal of location Based services, 10(1), 31-46. doi:10.1080/17489725.2016.1169322.

This post is part of a series. Read more about movement data in GIS.

Data sourcing and preparation is one of the most time consuming tasks in many spatial analyses. Even though the Austrian data.gv.at platform already provides a central catalog, the individual datasets still vary considerably in their accessibility or readiness for use.

OGD.AT Lab is a new repository collecting Jupyter notebooks for working with Austrian Open Government Data and other auxiliary open data sources. The notebooks illustrate different use cases, including so far:

1. Accessing geodata from the city of Vienna WFS
2. Downloading environmental data (heat vulnerability and air quality)
3. Geocoding addresses and getting elevation information
4. Exploring urban movement data

Data processing and visualization are performed using Pandas, GeoPandas, and Holoviews. GeoPandas makes it straighforward to use data from WFS. Therefore, OGD.AT Lab can provide one universal gdf_from_wfs() function which takes the desired WFS layer as an argument and returns a GeoPandas.GeoDataFrame that is ready for analysis:

Launch this notebook in: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/anitagraser/ogd-at-lab/v0.1?urlpath=lab/tree/notebooks/wien-ogd.ipynb

Many other datasets are provided as CSV files which need to be joined with spatial datasets to use them in spatial analysis. For example, the “Urban heat vulnerability index” dataset which needs to be joined to statistical areas.

Launch this notebook in Mybinder: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/anitagraser/ogd-at-lab/v0.1?urlpath=lab/tree/notebooks/environment.ipynb

Another issue with many CSV files is that they use German number formatting, where commas are used as a decimal separater instead of dots:

Besides file access, there are also open services provided by other developers, for example, Manfred Egger developed an elevation service that provides elevation information for any point in Austria. In combination with geocoding services, such as Nominatim, this makes is possible to, for example, find the elevation for any address in Austria:

Launch this notebook in MyBinder: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/anitagraser/ogd-at-lab/v0.1?urlpath=lab/tree/notebooks/elevation.ipynb

Last but not least, the first version of the mobility notebook showcases open travel time data provided by Uber Movement:

Launch this notebook in Mybinder: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/anitagraser/ogd-at-lab/v0.1?urlpath=lab/tree/notebooks/mobility.ipynb

The utility functions for data access included in this repository will continue to grow as new data sources are included. Eventually, it may make sense to extract the data access function into a dedicated library, similar to geofi (Finland) or geobr (Brazil).

If you’re aware of any interesting open datasets or services that should be included in OGD.AT, feel free to reach out here or on Github through the issue tracker or by providing a pull request.

In the previous post, we explored how hvPlot and Datashader can help us to visualize large CSVs with point data in interactive map plots. Of course, the spatial distribution of points usually only shows us one part of the whole picture. Today, we’ll therefore look into how to explore other data attributes by linking other (non-spatial) plots to the map.

This functionality, referred to as “linked brushing” or “crossfiltering” is under active development and the following experiment was prompted by a recent thread on Twitter launched by @plotlygraphs announcement of HoloViews 1.14:

Turns out these features are not limited to plotly but can also be used with Bokeh and hvPlot:

Like in the previous post, this demo uses a Pandas DataFrame with 12 million rows (and HoloViews 1.13.4).

In addition to the map plot, we also create a histogram from the same DataFrame:

map_plot = df.hvplot.scatter(x='x', y='y', datashade=True, height=300, width=400)
hist_plot = df.where((df.SOG>0) & (df.SOG<50)).hvplot.hist("SOG",  bins=20, width=400, height=200) 

To link the two plots, we use HoloViews’ link_selections function:

from holoviews.selection import link_selections
linked_plots = link_selections(map_plot + hist_plot)

That’s all! We can now perform spatial filters in the map and attribute value filters in the histogram and the filters are automatically applied to the linked plots:

Linked brushing demo using ship movement data (AIS): filtering records by speed (SOG) reveals spatial patterns of fast and slow movement.

You’ve probably noticed that there is no background map in the above plot. I had to remove the background map tiles to get rid of an error in Holoviews 1.13.4. This error has been fixed in 1.14.0 but I ran into other issues with the datashaded Scatterplot.

It’s worth noting that not all plot types support linked brushing. For the complete list, please refer to http://holoviews.org/user_guide/Linked_Brushing.html

Even with all their downsides, CSV files are still a common data exchange format – particularly between disciplines with different tech stacks. Indeed, “How to Specify Data Types of CSV Columns for Use in QGIS” (originally written in 2011) is still one of the most popular posts on this blog. QGIS continues to be quite handy for visualizing CSV file contents. However, there are times when it’s just not enough, particularly when the number of rows in the CSV is in the range of multiple million. The following example uses a 12 million point CSV:

To give you an idea of the waiting times in QGIS, I’ve run the following script which loads and renders the CSV:

from datetime import datetime

def get_time():
    t2 = datetime.now()
    print(t2)
    print(t2-t1)
    print('Done :)')

canvas = iface.mapCanvas()
canvas.mapCanvasRefreshed.connect(get_time)

print('Starting ...')

t0 = datetime.now()
print(t0)

print('Loading CSV ...')

uri = "file:///E:/Geodata/AISDK/raw_ais/aisdk_20170701.csv?type=csv&xField=Longitude&yField=Latitude&crs=EPSG:4326&"
vlayer = QgsVectorLayer(uri, "layer name you like", "delimitedtext")

t1 = datetime.now()
print(t1)
print(t1 - t0)

print('Rendering ...')

QgsProject.instance().addMapLayer(vlayer)

The script output shows that creating the vector layer takes 02:39 minutes and rendering it takes over 05:10 minutes:

Starting ...
2020-12-06 12:35:56.266002
Loading CSV ...
2020-12-06 12:38:35.565332
0:02:39.299330
Rendering ...
2020-12-06 12:43:45.637504
0:05:10.072172
Done :)

Rendered CSV file in QGIS

Panning and zooming around are no fun either since rendering takes so long. Changing from a single symbol renderer to, for example, a heatmap renderer does not improve the rendering times. So we need a different solutions when we want to efficiently explore large point CSV files.

The Pandas data analysis library is well-know for being a convenient tool for handling CSVs. However, it’s less clear how to use it as a replacement for desktop GIS for exploring large CSVs with point coordinates. My favorite solution so far uses hvPlot + HoloViews + Datashader to provide interactive Bokeh plots in Jupyter notebooks.

hvPlot provides a high-level plotting API built on HoloViews that provides a general and consistent API for plotting data in (Geo)Pandas, xarray, NetworkX, dask, and others. (Image source: https://hvplot.holoviz.org)

But first things first! Loading the CSV as a Pandas Dataframe takes 10.7 seconds. Pandas’ default plotting function (based on Matplotlib), however, takes around 13 seconds and only produces a static scatter plot.

Loading and plotting the CSV with Pandas

hvPlot to the rescue!

We only need two more steps to get faster and interactive map plots (plus background maps!): First, we need to reproject the lat/lon values. (There’s a warning here, most likely since some of the input lat/lon values are invalid.) Then, we replace plot() with hvplot() and voilà:

Plotting the CSV with Datashader

As you can see from the above GIF, the whole process barely takes 2 seconds and the resulting map plot is interactive and very responsive.

12 million points are far from the limit. As long as the Pandas DataFrame fits into memory, we are good and when the datasets get bigger than that, there are Dask DataFrames. But that’s a story for another day.

The latest v0.5 release is now available from conda-forge.

New features include:

• Stop detection and trajectory splitting at stops
• Improved CRS handling and warnings when CRS is missing

As always, all tutorials are available on MyBinder:

Detected stops (left) and trajectory split at stops (right)

Podcasts have become huge. I’m an avid listener of podcasts myself. I particularly enjoy formats that take the time to talk about unconventional topics in detail.

My first podcast experience was on the QGIS podcast hosted by Tim Sutton in 2014. Unfortunately, it seems like the podcast episodes are not online anymore.

Recently, I had the pleasure to join the MapScaping Podcast by Daniel O’Donohue to talk about Python for Geospatial: 

Other guests Daniel has already interviewed include:

• Kurt Menke talking first about QGIS and in a second episode on QField and Input (data collection apps based on QGIS) and
• Paul Ramsey on Vector Tiles from PostGIS

Another geospatial podcast I really enjoy is The Mappyist Hour by Silas and Todd. Unfortunately, it’s a bit silent there now but it’s definitely worth to listen into their episode archive. One of my favorites is Episode 9 where Linda Stevens (Hecht) discusses her career at ESRI, the future of GIS, and the role of Open Source Spatial in that future:

If you listen to and want to recommend other spatial podcasts, please share them in the comments!

This post introduces Holoviz Panel, a library that makes it possible to create really quick dashboards in notebook environments as well as more sophisticated custom interactive web apps and dashboards.

The following example shows how to use Panel to explore a dataset (a trajectory collection in this case) and different parameter settings (relating to trajectory generalization). All the Panel code we need is a dict that defines the parameters that we want to explore. Then we can use Panel’s interact function to automatically generate a dashboard for our custom plotting function:

import panel as pn

kw = dict(traj_id=(1, len(traj_collection)), 
          tolerance=(10, 100, 10), 
          generalizer=['douglas-peucker', 'min-distance'])
pn.interact(plot_generalized, **kw)

Click to view the resulting dashboard in full resolution:

The plotting function uses the parameters to generate a Holoviews plot. First it fetches a specific trajectory from the trajectory collection. Then it generalizes the trajectory using the specified parameter settings. As you can see, we can easily combine maps and other plots to visualize different aspects of the data:

def plot_generalized(traj_id=1, tolerance=10, generalizer='douglas-peucker'):
  my_traj = traj_collection.get_trajectory(traj_id).to_crs(CRS(4088))
  if generalizer=='douglas-peucker':
    generalized = mpd.DouglasPeuckerGeneralizer(my_traj).generalize(tolerance)
  else:
    generalized = mpd.MinDistanceGeneralizer(my_traj).generalize(tolerance)
  generalized.add_speed(overwrite=True)
  return ( 
    generalized.hvplot(
      title='Trajectory {} (tolerance={})'.format(my_traj.id, tolerance), 
      c='speed', cmap='Viridis', colorbar=True, clim=(0,20), 
      line_width=10, width=500, height=500) + 
    generalized.df['speed'].hvplot.hist(
      title='Speed histogram', width=300, height=500) 
    )

Trajectory collections and generalization functions used in this example are part of the MovingPandas library. If you are interested in movement data analysis, you should check it out! You can find this example notebook in the MovingPandas tutorial section.

In December, I wrote about GeoPandas on Databricks. Back then, I also tried to get MovingPandas working but without luck. (While GeoPandas can be installed using Databricks’ dbutils.library.installPyPI("geopandas") this PyPI install just didn’t want to work for MovingPandas.)

Now that MovingPandas is available from conda-forge, I gave it another try and … *spoiler alert* … it works!

First of all, conda support on Databricks is in beta. It’s not included in the default runtimes. At the time of writing this post, “6.0 Conda Beta” is the latest runtime with conda:

Once the cluster is up and connected to the notebook, a quick conda list shows the installed packages:

Time to install MovingPandas! I went with a 100% conda-forge installation. This takes a looong time (almost half an hour)!

When the installs are finally done, it get’s serious: time to test the imports!

Success!

Now we can put the MovingPandas data structures to good use. But first we need to load some movement data:

Or course, the points in this GeoDataFrame can be plotted. However, the plot isn’t automatically displayed once plot() is called on the GeoDataFrame. Instead, Databricks provides a display() function to display Matplotlib figures:

MovingPandas also uses Matplotlib. Therefore we can use the same approach to plot the TrajectoryCollection that can be created from the GeoDataFrame:

These Matplotlib plots are nice and quick but they lack interactivity and therefore are of limited use for data exploration.

MovingPandas provides interactive plotting (including base maps) using hvplot. hvplot is based on Bokeh and, luckily, the Databricks documentation tells us that bokeh plots can be exported to html and then displayed using  displayHTML():

Of course, we could achieve all this on MyBinder as well (and much more quickly). However, Databricks gets interesting once we can add (Py)Spark and distributed processing to the mix. For example, “Getting started with PySpark & GeoPandas on Databricks” shows a spatial join function that adds polygon information to a point GeoDataFrame.

A potential use case for MovingPandas would be to speed up flow map computations. The recently added aggregator functionality (currently in master only) first computes clusters of significant trajectory points and then aggregates the trajectories into flows between these clusters. Matching trajectory points to the closest cluster could be a potential use case for distributed computing. Each trajectory (or each point) can be handled independently, only the cluster locations have to be broadcast to all workers.

Flow map (screenshot from MovingPandas tutorial 4_generalization_and_aggregation.ipynb)