/03-censusables

Private repo for Team 7.

Primary LanguageJavaScriptApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

==================================== DDL Incubator 3, Team 7, Censusables

Build notes

Since this project uses scikit-learn, I would recommend installing the [Anaconda] (https://www.continuum.io/downloads) package. Then, for most packages, you can use conda to install additional packages. However, Anaconda does not play well with virtualenv.

If you choose not to install Anaconda, for Mac and Linux, you need development tools and libraries installed. You will need to install a Fortran compiler by installing gcc:

liblapack-dev
gfortan

I suspect this won't be an issue on Linux, assuming you have gcc installed. For Windows, pip and buildout will be downloading binary distributions.

Basic packages you will need:

requests
matplotlib
numpy
scikit-learn
pandas
Flask
vincent
gunicorn

Application

Censusables is a basic Flask web application that allows a user to weight preferences of Average Income, Housing Cost, Diversity, and Population Density to identify zip code neighborhoods that are the best fit his/her selections.

The application uses a combination of US Census (American Community Survey 5 year) data downloaded from [NHGIS] (https://www.nhgis.org/) and Zillow housing and rental data.

Data Model

The application uses Pandas' DataFrames and Scikit-learn's Principal Component Package to standardize and create 4 separate principal component analyses for each of the above parameters. The first principal component of each analsysis is used as an index on each zip code. These indexes are then normalized on a scale of 0 to 1. Based on the values of the web sliders, the application will determine the zip codes that are the closest fit to the 4 variables. If no state is selected, a heat map of US is diplayed. The darker colors represent the zip codes that are a closer match to the selections. The top 5 zip codes are displayed on the page. If a state is selected, the data is filtered, diplaying a state map and the top 5 zip codes of that state.

Visualizations

The maps use topo.json files and Vincent to display the visualizations.

Example

A sample application has been deployed to Heroku HERE.