Sebastian Hoffmeister, Trainer and Statistical Consultant, STATCON
Bertram Schäfer, Owner, STATCON
The starting point for the development of the presented script was a spatial market analysis for one of our customers. Having a list of addresses of their shops and a list of addresses of their competitors’ shops, we needed to analyse the distances between these locations to create a predictor for the impact on the sales. The required car driving distances were gathered from the Google Maps API via the JMP R interface. For data visualisation purposes, the geocoordinates for that addresses were needed, too (geocoding). Based on that, the script was extended to allow several other commonly needed features for the analysis of spatial data. These are: 1) simplifying the process of importing custom maps from shape files into JMP, 2) solving and visualising traveling salesman problems, and 3) generation of different distance matrices (linear, driving, walking distance).
