All posts tagged geocoding

Geocoding the CMS NPI Registry (python)

So previously I wrote out creating service deserts. I have since found a nicer data source to use for this, the NPI CMS registry. This data file has over 6 million service providers across the US.

Here I will provide an example of using that data to geocode all the pharmacy’s in Texas, again using the census geocoding API and python.

Chunking up the NPI database

So first, you can again download the entire NPI database from here. So I have already downloaded and unzipped that file, which contains a CSV for the January version, named npidata_pfile_20050523-20210110.csv. So as some upfront, here are the libraries I will be using, and I also set the directory to where my data is located.

###############################
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import censusgeocode as cg
import time
from datetime import datetime
import os
os.chdir(r'D:\HospitalData\NPPES_Data_Dissemination_January_2021')
###############################

The file is just a bit too big for me to fit in memory on my machine. On Windows, you can use Get-Content npidata_pfile_20050523-20210110.csv | Measure-Object -Line in powershell to get the line counts, or on Unix use wc -l *.csv for example. So I know the file is not quite 6.7 million rows.

So what I do here is create a function to read in the csv file in chunks, only select the columns and rows that I want, and then return that data frame. In the end, you need to search across all of the Taxonomy codes to pull out the type of service provider you want. So for community pharmacies, the code is 3336C0003X, but it is not always in the first Taxonomy slot (some CVS’s have it in the second slot for example). You can see the big list of taxonomy codes here, so my criminology friends may say be interested in mental health or substance abuse service providers for other examples.

In addition to the taxonomy code, I always select organizations, not individuals (Entity Type = 2). And then I only select out pharmacies in Texas (although I bet you could fit all of the US pharmacies in memory pretty easily, maybe 60k in total?) Caveat emptor, I am not 100% sure how to use the deactivation codes properly in this database, as that data is always NaN for Texas pharmacies.

######################################################################
# Prepping the input data in chunks

keep_col = ['NPI','Entity Type Code','Provider Organization Name (Legal Business Name)',
            'NPI Deactivation Reason Code','NPI Deactivation Date','NPI Reactivation Date',
            'Provider First Line Business Practice Location Address',
            'Provider Business Practice Location Address City Name',
            'Provider Business Practice Location Address State Name',
            'Provider Business Practice Location Address Postal Code']
            
taxon_codes = ['Healthcare Provider Taxonomy Code_' + str(i+1) for i in range(15)]
keep_col += taxon_codes
community_pharm = '3336C0003X'
npi_csv = 'npidata_pfile_20050523-20210110.csv' #Newer files will prob change the name

# This defines the rows I want
def sub_rows(data):
    ec = data['Entity Type Code'] == "2"
    st = data['Provider Business Practice Location Address State Name'] == 'TX'
    ta = (data[taxon_codes] == community_pharm).any(axis=1)
    #ac = data['NPI Deactivation Reason Code'].isna()
    all_together = ec & st & ta #& ac
    sub = data[all_together]
    return sub

def csv_chunks(file,chunk_size,keep_cols,row_sub):
    # First lets get the header and figure out the column indices
    header_fields = list(pd.read_csv(npi_csv, nrows=1))
    header_locs = [header_fields.index(i) for i in keep_cols]
    # Now reading in a chunk of data
    skip = 1
    it_n = 0
    sub_n = 0
    ret_chunk = chunk_size
    fin_li_dat = []
    while ret_chunk == chunk_size:
        file_chunk = pd.read_csv(file, usecols=header_locs, skiprows=skip, 
                     nrows=chunk_size, names=header_fields, dtype='str')
        sub_dat = row_sub(file_chunk)
        fin_li_dat.append( sub_dat.copy() )
        skip += chunk_size
        it_n += 1
        sub_n += sub_dat.shape[0]
        print(f'Grabbed iter {it_n} total sub n so far {sub_n}')
        ret_chunk = file_chunk.shape[0]
    fin_dat = pd.concat(fin_li_dat, axis=0)
    return fin_dat


# Takes about 3 minutes
print( datetime.now() )
pharm_tx = csv_chunks(npi_csv, chunk_size=1000000, keep_cols=keep_col, row_sub=sub_rows)
print( datetime.now() )

# No deactivated codes in all of Texas
print( pharm_tx['NPI Deactivation Reason Code'].value_counts() )
######################################################################

So this ends up returning not quite 6800 pharmacies in all of Texas.

Geocoding using the census API

So first, the address data is pretty well formatted. But for those new to geocoding, if you have end parts of address strings like Apt 21 or Suite C, those endings will typically throw geocoders off the mark. So in just a few minutes, I noted the different strings that marked the parts of the addresses I should chop off, and wrote a function to clean those up. Besides that I just limit the zip code to 5 digits, as that field is a mix of 5 and 9 digit zipcodes.

######################################################################
# Now prepping the data for geocoding

ph_tx = pharm_tx.drop(columns=taxon_codes).reset_index(drop=True)

#['Provider First Line Business Practice Location Address', 'Provider Business Practice Location Address City Name', 'Provider Business Practice Location Address State Name', 'Provider Business Practice Location Address Postal Code']

# I just looked through the files and saw that after these strings are not needed
end_str = [' STE', ' SUITE', ' BLDG', ' TOWER', ', #', ' UNIT',
           ' APT', ' BUILDING',',', '#']

 
def clean_add(address):
    add_new = address.upper()
    for su in end_str:
        sf = address.find(su)
        if sf > -1:
            add_new = add_new[0:sf]
    add_new = add_new.replace('.','')
    add_new = add_new.strip()
    return add_new

# Some examples
clean_add('5700 S GESSNER DR STE G')
clean_add('10701-B WEST BELFORT SUITE 170')
clean_add('100 EAST UNIVERSITY BLVD.')
clean_add('5800 BELLAIRE BLVD BLDG 1')
clean_add('2434 N I-35 # S')

ph_tx['Zip5'] = ph_tx['Provider Business Practice Location Address Postal Code'].str[0:5]
ph_tx['Address'] = ph_tx['Provider First Line Business Practice Location Address'].apply(clean_add)
ph_tx.rename(columns={'Provider Business Practice Location Address City Name':'City',
                      'Provider Business Practice Location Address State Name':'State2'},
             inplace=True)
######################################################################

Next is my function to use the batch geocoding in the census api. Note the census api is a bit finicky – technically the census api says you can do batches of up to 5k rows, but I tend to get kicked off for higher values. So here I have a function that chunks it up into tinier batch portions and submits to the API. (A better function would cache intermediate results and wrap all that jazz in a try function.)

 ######################################################################
 #This function breaks up the input data frame into chunks
 #For the census geocoding api
 def split_geo(df, add, city, state, zipcode, chunk_size=500):
     df_new = df.copy()
     df_new.reset_index(inplace=True)
     splits = np.ceil( df.shape[0]/chunk_size)
     chunk_li = np.array_split(df_new['index'], splits)
     res_li = []
     pick_fi = []
     for i,c in enumerate(chunk_li):
         # Grab data, export to csv
         sub_data = df_new.loc[c, ['index',add,city,state,zipcode]]
         sub_data.to_csv('temp_geo.csv',header=False,index=False)
         # Geo the results and turn back into df
         print(f'Geocoding round {int(i)+1} of {int(splits)}, {datetime.now()}')
         result = cg.addressbatch('temp_geo.csv') #should try/except?
         # May want to dump the intermediate results
         #pi_str = f'pickres_{int(i)}.p'
         #pickle.dump( favorite_color, open( pi_str, "wb" ) )
         #pick_fi.append(pi_str.copy())
         names = list(result[0].keys())
         res_zl = []
         for r in result:
             res_zl.append( list(r.values()) )
         res_df = pd.DataFrame(res_zl, columns=names)
         res_li.append( res_df.copy() )
         time.sleep(10) #sleep 10 seconds to not get cutoff from request
     final_df = pd.concat(res_li)
     final_df.rename(columns={'id':'row'}, inplace=True)
     final_df.reset_index(inplace=True, drop=True)
     # Clean up csv file
     os.remove('temp_geo.csv')
     return final_df
 ######################################################################

And now we are onto the final stage, actually running the geocoding function, and piping the end results to a csv file. (Which you can see the final version here.)

######################################################################
# Geocoding the data in chunks

# Takes around 35 minutes
geo_pharm = split_geo(ph_tx, add='Address', city='City', state='State2', zipcode='Zip5', chunk_size=100)

#What is the geocoding hit rate?
print( geo_pharm['match'].value_counts() )
# Only around 65%

# Now merging back with the original data if you want
# Not quite sorted how I need them
geo_pharm['rowN'] = geo_pharm['row'].astype(int)
gp2 = geo_pharm.sort_values(by='rowN').reset_index(drop=True)

# Fields I want
kg = ['address','match','lat','lon']
kd = ['NPI',
      'Provider Organization Name (Legal Business Name)',
      'Provider First Line Business Practice Location Address',
      'Address','City','State2','Zip5']

final_pharm = pd.concat( [ph_tx[kd], gp2[kg]], axis=1 )

final_pharm.to_csv('Pharmacies_Texas.csv',index=False)
######################################################################

Unfortunately the geocoding hit rate is pretty disappointing, only around 65% in this sample. So if I were using this for a project, I would likely do a round of geocoding using the Google API (which is a bit more unforgiving for varied addresses), or perhaps build my own openstreet map geocoder for the US. (Or in general if you don’t have too many to review, doing it interactively in ArcGIS is very nice as well if you have access to Arc.)

2 Comments
by apwheele on February 9, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in geocoding, healthcare, Mapping, Python
Tagged ,

Posted by apwheele on February 9, 2021

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2021/02/09/geocoding-the-cms-npi-registry-python/

Geocoding with census data and the Census API

For my online GIS class I have a tutorial on creating an address locator using street centerline data in ArcGIS. Eventually I would like to put all of my class online, but for now I am just sharing that one, as I’ve forwarded it alot recently.

That tutorial used local street centerline data in Dallas that you can download from Dallas’s open data site. It also gives directions on how to use an online ESRI geocoding service — which Dallas has. But what if those are not an option? A student recently wanted to geocode data from San Antonio, and the only street data file they publicly provide lacks the beginning and ending street number.

That data is insufficient to create an address locator. It is also the case that the road data you can download from the census’s web interface lacks this data. But you can download street centerline data with beginning and end addresses from the census from the FTP site. For example here is the url that contains the streets with the address features. To use that you just have to figure out what state and county you are interested in downloaded. The census even has ESRI address locators already made for you using 2012 data at the state level. Again you just need to figure out your states number and download it.

Once you download the data with the begin and ending street numbers you can follow along with that tutorial the same as the public data.

Previously I’ve written about using the Google geocoding API. If you just have crime data from one jurisdiction, it is simple to make a geocoder for just that locality. But if you have data for many cities (say if you were geocoding home addresses) this can be more difficult. An alternative online API to google that does not have daily limits is the Census Geocoding API.

Here is a simple example in R of calling the census API and geocoding a list of addresses.

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)

get_CensusAdd <- function(street,city,state,zip,benchmark=4){
    base <- "https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/locations/address?"
    soup <- GET(url=base,query=list(street=street,city=city,state=state,zip=zip,format='json',benchmark=benchmark))
    dat <- fromJSON(content(soup,as='text'), simplifyVector=TRUE)
    D_dat <- dat$result$addressMatches
    if (length(D_dat) > 1){
    return(c(D_dat['matchedAddress'],D_dat['coordinates'][[1]])) #error will just return null, x[1] is lon, x[2] is lat
    }
    else {return(c('',NA,NA))}
}

#now create function to loop over data frame and return set of addresses
geo_CensusTIGER <- function(street,city,state,zip,sleep=1,benchmark=4){
  #make empy matrix
  l <- length(street)
  MyDat <- data.frame(matrix(nrow=l,ncol=3))
  names(MyDat) <- c("MatchedAdd","Lon","Lat")
  for (i in 1:l){
    x <- suppressMessages(get_CensusAdd(street=street[i],city=city[i],state=state[i],zip=zip[i],benchmark=benchmark))
    if (length(x) > 0){
        MyDat[i,1] <- x[1]
        MyDat[i,2] <- x[2]
        MyDat[i,3] <- x[3]
    }
    Sys.sleep(sleep)
  }
  MyDat$street <- street
  MyDat$city <- city
  MyDat$zip <- zip
  MyDat$state <- state
  return(MyDat)
}

## Arbitrary dataframe for an exercise
AddList <- data.frame(
  IdNum = c(1,2,3,4,5),
  Address = c("450 W Harwood Rd", "2878 Fake St", "2775 N Collin St", "2775 N Collins St", "Lakewood Blvd and W Shore Dr"),
  City = c("Hurst", "Richardson", "Arlington", "Arlington", "Dallas"),
  State = c("TX", "TX", "TX", "TX", "TX")
)

test <- geo_CensusTIGER(street=AddList$Address,city=AddList$City,state=AddList$State,zip=rep('',5))

If you check out the results, you will see that this API does not appear to do fuzzy matching. 2775 N Collin St failed, whereas 2775 N Collins St was able to return a match. You can also see though it will return an intersection, but in my tests "/" did not work (so in R you can simply use gsub to replace different intersection types with and). I haven’t experimented with it too much, so let me know if you have any other insight into this API.

I will follow up in another post a python function to use the Census geocoding API, as well as using the Nominatim online geocoding API, which you can use for addresses outside of the United States.

1 Comment
by apwheele on August 3, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Crime Mapping, geocoding, R
Tagged ,

Posted by apwheele on August 3, 2017

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2017/08/03/geocoding-with-census-data-and-the-census-api/

Using the Google Geocoding API with Python

Previously I posted how to use the geopy python library to call the Google geocode API. But somewhere along the way my version of geopy was not working (maybe because the API changed). Instead of figuring out that problem, I just wrote my own function to call the Google API directly. No need to worry about installing geopy.

Part of the reason I blog is so I have notes for myself – I’m pretty sure I’ve rewritten this several times for different quick geocoding projects, but I couldn’t find them this morning when I needed to do it again. So here is a blog post for my own future reference.

Here is the function, it takes as input the full string address. Also I was getting back some null responses by rapid fire calling the API (with only 27 addresses), so I set the function to delay for five seconds and that seemed to fix that problem.

import urllib, json, time
def GoogGeoAPI(address,api="",delay=5):
  base = r"https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?"
  addP = "address=" + address.replace(" ","+")
  GeoUrl = base + addP + "&key=" + api
  response = urllib.urlopen(GeoUrl)
  jsonRaw = response.read()
  jsonData = json.loads(jsonRaw)
  if jsonData['status'] == 'OK':
    resu = jsonData['results'][0]
    finList = [resu['formatted_address'],resu['geometry']['location']['lat'],resu['geometry']['location']['lng']]
  else:
    finList = [None,None,None]
  time.sleep(delay) #in seconds
  return finList

And here is an example use of the function. It returns the formatted address, the latitude and the longitude.

#Example Use
test = r"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA"
geoR = GoogGeoAPI(address=test)
print geoR

This works for a few addresses without an API key. Even with an API key though the limit I believe is 2,500 – so don’t use this to geocode a large list. Also if you have some special characters in your address field this will take more work. For example if you have an & for an intersection I bet this url call will fail. But that should not be too hard to deal with. Also note the terms of service for using the API (which I don’t understand – so don’t ask me!)

I should eventually wrap up all of this google API python code into an extension for SPSS. Don’t hold your breath though for me getting the time to do that.

Here is an update for Python 3+ (the urllib library changed a bit). Also shows how to extract out the postal code.

#Update For Python 3+
#Also includes example parsing out the postal code
import urllib.request, urllib.parse 
import json, time
key = r'???!!!your key here!!!!????'

def GoogGeoAPI(address,api="",delay=3):
  base = r"https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?"
  addP = "address=" + urllib.parse.quote_plus(address)
  GeoUrl = base + addP + "&key=" + api
  response = urllib.request.urlopen(GeoUrl)
  jsonRaw = response.read()
  jsonData = json.loads(jsonRaw)
  if jsonData['status'] == 'OK':
    resu = jsonData['results'][0]
    post_code = -1
    for i in resu['address_components']:
      if i['types'][0] == 'postal_code':
        post_code = i['long_name'] #not sure if everything always has a long name?
    finList = [resu['formatted_address'],resu['geometry']['location']['lat'],resu['geometry']['location']['lng'],post_code]
  else:
    finList = [None,None,None,None]
  time.sleep(delay) #in seconds
  return finList
  
test = r"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA"
geoR = GoogGeoAPI(address=test,api=key,delay=0)
print(geoR)
7 Comments
by apwheele on April 5, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in geocoding, Python
Tagged , ,

Posted by apwheele on April 5, 2016

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2016/04/05/using-the-google-geocoding-api-with-python/

Online geocoding in R using the NYS GIS server

Previously I wrote a post on using the NYS ESRI geocoding server in python. I recently wrote a function in R to do the same. The base url server has changed since I wrote the Python post, but it is easy to update that (the JSON returned doesn’t change.) This should also be simple to update for other ESRI servers, just change the base variable in the first function. This uses the httr package to get the url and the jsonlite package to parse the response.

#################################################################
#Functions for geocoding using online NYS GIS Esri API, https://gis.ny.gov/
library(httr)
library(jsonlite)

#getting a single address, WKID 4326 is WGS 1984, so returns lat/lon
get_NYSAdd <- function(address,WKID='4326'){
  base <- "http://gisservices.dhses.ny.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/Street_and_Address_Composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates"
  soup <- GET(url=base,query=list(SingleLine=address,maxLocations='1',outSR=WKID,f='pjson'))
  dat <- fromJSON(content(soup,as='text'),simplifyVector=TRUE)$candidates
  return(dat)
}
#looping over a vector of addresses, parsing, and returning a data frame
geo_NYSAdd <- function(addresses,...){
  #make empy matrix
  l <- length(addresses)
  MyDat <- data.frame(matrix(nrow=l,ncol=3))
  names(MyDat) <- c("Address","Lon","Lat")
  for (i in 1:l){
    x <- get_NYSAdd(address=addresses[i],...)
    if (length(x) > 0){
      MyDat[i,1] <- x[,1]
      MyDat[i,2] <- x[,2][1]
      MyDat[i,3] <- x[,2][2]
    }
  }
  MyDat$OrigAdd <- addresses
  return(MyDat)
}
#################################################################

The first function takes a single address, gets and parses the returning JSON. The second function loops over a list of addresses and returns a data frame with the original addresses, the matched address, and the lat/lon coordinates. I use a loop instead of an apply type function because with the web server you really shouldn’t submit large jobs that it would take along time anyway. The NYS server is free and has no 2,500 limit, but I wouldn’t submit jobs much bigger than that though.

AddList <- c("100 Washington Ave, Albany, NY","100 Washington Ave Ext, Albany, NY",
             "421 New Karner Rd., Albany, NY","Washington Ave. and Lark St., Albany, NY","poop")
GeoAddresses <- geo_NYSAdd(addresses=AddList)
GeoAddresses

We can compare these to what the google geocoding api returns (using the ggmap package):

library(ggmap)
googleAddresses <- geocode(AddList,source="google")
GeoAddresses$G_lon <- googleAddresses$lon
GeoAddresses$G_lat <- googleAddresses$lat
GeoAddresses

And we can see that the nonsense "poop" address was actually geocoded! See some similar related funny results from the google maps geocoding via StackMaps.

We can also see some confusion between Washington Ave. Ext as well. The NYS online server should theoretically have more up to date data than Google, but as above shows it is not always better. To do geocoding well takes some serious time to examine the initial addresses and the resulting coordinates in my experience.

To calculate the great circle distance between the coordinates we can use the spDists function in the sp library.

library(sp)
spDists(x = as.matrix(GeoAddresses[1:4,c("Lon","Lat")]),
        y = as.matrix(GeoAddresses[1:4,c("G_lon","G_lat")]),
        longlat=TRUE,diagonal=TRUE) #distance in kilometers

But really, we should just project the data and calculate the Euclidean distance (see the proj4 library). Note that using the law of cosines is typically not recommended for very small distances, so the last distance is suspect. (For reference I point to some resources and analysis showing how to calculate great circle distances in SPSS on Nabble recently.)

3 Comments
by apwheele on September 22, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in geocoding, R
Tagged ,

Posted by apwheele on September 22, 2015

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2015/09/22/online-geocoding-in-r-using-the-nys-gis-server/

Using the New York State Online Geocoding API with Python

I’ve been very lucky doing geographic analysis in New York state, as the majority of base map layers I need, and in particular streets centerline files for geocoding, are available statewide at the NYS GIS Clearing house. I’ve written in the past how to use various Google API’s for geo data, and here I will show how one can use the NYS SAM Address database and their ESRI online geocoding service. I explored this because Google’s terms of service are restrictive, and the NYS composite locator should be more comprehensive/up to date in matches (in theory).

So first, this is basically the same as with most online API’s (at least in my limited experience), submit a particular url and get JSON in return. You just then need to parse the JSON for whatever info you need. This is meant to be used within SPSS, but the function works with just a single field address string and returns the single top hit in a list of length 3, with the unicode string address, and then the x and y coordinates. (The function is of course a valid python function, so you could use this in any environment you want.) The coordinates are specified using ESRI’s WKID (see the list for projected and geographic coordinate systems). In the code I have it fixed as WKID 4326, which is WGS 1984, and so returns the longitude and latitude for the address. When the search returns no hits, it just returns a list of [None,None,None].

*Function to use NYS geocoding API.
BEGIN PROGRAM Python.
import urllib, json

def ParsNYGeo(jBlob):
  if not jBlob['candidates']:
    data = [None,None,None]
  else:
    add = jBlob['candidates'][0]['address']
    y = jBlob['candidates'][0]['location']['y']
    x = jBlob['candidates'][0]['location']['x']
    data = [add,x,y]
  return data

def NYSGeo(Add, WKID=4326):
  base = "http://gisservices.dhses.ny.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/SAM_composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?SingleLine="
  wkid = "&maxLocations=1&outSR=4326"
  end = "&f=pjson"
  mid = Add.replace(' ','+')
  MyUrl = base + mid + wkid + end
  soup = urllib.urlopen(MyUrl)
  jsonRaw = soup.read()
  jsonData = json.loads(jsonRaw)
  MyDat = ParsNYGeo(jsonData)
  return MyDat

t1 = "100 Washington Ave, Albany, NY"
t2 = "100 Washington Ave, Poop"

Out = NYSGeo(t1)
print Out

Empt = NYSGeo(t2)
print Empt
END PROGRAM.

So you can see in the code sample that you need both the street address and the city in one field. And here is a quick example with some data in SPSS. Just the zip code doesn’t return any results. There is some funny results here though in this test run, and yes that Washington Ave. extension has caused me geocoding headaches in the past.

*Example using with SPSS data.
DATA LIST FREE / MyAdd (A100).
BEGIN DATA
"100 Washington Ave, Albany"
"100 Washinton Ave, Albany"
"100 Washington Ave, Albany, NY 12203"
"100 Washington Ave, Albany, NY, 12203"
"100 Washington Ave, Albany, NY 12206"
"100 Washington Ave, Poop"
"12222"
END DATA.
DATASET NAME NY_Add.

SPSSINC TRANS RESULT=GeoAdd lon lat TYPE=100 0 0 
  /FORMULA NYSGeo(Add=MyAdd).

LIST ALL.
6 Comments
by apwheele on April 2, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Mapping, Python, SPSS
Tagged , ,

Posted by apwheele on April 2, 2015

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2015/04/02/using-the-new-york-state-online-geocoding-api-with-python/

Using Python to geocode data in SPSS

This is the first time since I’ve been using SPSS that I have regular access to Python and R programmability in all of the different places I use SPSS (home and multiple work computers). So I’ve been exploring more solutions to use these tools in regular data analysis and work-flows – of course to accomplish things that can not be done directly in native SPSS code.

The example I am going to show today is using geopy, a Python library that places several geocoding API’s all in a convenient set of scripts. So first once geopy is installed you can call Python code within SPSS by placing it within a BEGIN PROGRAM and END PROGRAM blocks. Here is an example modified from geopy’s tutorial.


BEGIN PROGRAM.
from geopy import geocoders
g = geocoders.GoogleV3()
place, (lat, lng) = g.geocode("135 Western Ave. Albany, NY")  
a = [place, lat, lng]
print a
END PROGRAM.

Now what we want to do is to geocode some address data that is currently stored in SPSS case data. So here is an example dataset with some addresses in Albany.


DATA LIST LIST ("|") / Address (A100).
BEGIN DATA
135 Western Ave. Albany, NY
Western Ave. and Quail St Albany, NY
325 Western Ave. Albany, NY
END DATA.
DATASET NAME Add.

Here I will use the handy SPSSINC TRANS function (provided when installing Python programmability – and as of SPSS 22 installed by default with SPSS) to return the geocoded coordinates using the Google API. The geocode function from geopy does not return the data in an array exactly how I want it, so what I do is create my own function, named g, and it coerces the individual objects (place, lat and lng) into an array and returns that.


BEGIN PROGRAM.
from geopy import geocoders
def g(a):
  g = geocoders.GoogleV3()
  place, (lat, lng) = g.geocode(a)
  return [place, lat, lng]
print g("135 Western Ave. Albany, NY")
END PROGRAM.

Now I can use the SPSSINC TRANS function to return the associated place string, as well as the latitude and longitude coordinates from Google.


SPSSINC TRANS RESULT=Place Lat Lng TYPE=100 0 0
  /FORMULA g(Address).

Pretty easy. Note that (I believe) the Google geocoding API has a limit of 2,500 cases – so don’t go submitting a million cases to be geocoded (use an offline solution for that). Also a mandatory mention should be made of the variable reliability of online geocoding services.

2 Comments
by apwheele on March 14, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Python, SPSS
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by apwheele on March 14, 2014

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2014/03/14/using-python-to-geocode-data-in-spss/