observablehq / observablehq/plot

Cluster contours / segmentation

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enhancement geo
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Description

For a map / scatterplot where the value is categorical, it would be nice to derive contours for each category. A way to do this might be to:

  1. apply a spatial interpolator to obtain a grid
  2. for each category c, contour the function value === c with a threshold of 0.5 (or 0.7 to tighten it a bit)
  3. done

(Also applies to quantitative data, by determining categorical bands.)

There are possibly better segmentation algorithms to consider.

This is currently possible to do (but very inefficiently) by running one contour mark for each category, with a value = 1 for points that belong to the category, and -1 for points that don't.

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Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start with the existing contour mark and compare its one-mark-per-category workflow with the proposed spatial interpolation, thresholding, and segmentation approaches. Done should produce contours for categorical values and support the suggested quantitative bands, with the chosen algorithm and API clearly defined.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
data-visualization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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