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classInterval(style="fisher") vs. ArcView GIS natural breaks

3 messages · Hervé Polesi, Roger Bivand, White.Denis@epamail.epa.gov

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Hi!

Working on a litle datebase (903 lines) I notice a difference between 
the result of classInterval(style="fisher") and the natural breaks 
proposed by ArcView GIS (3.2).
I read that ArcView works on a sample of data. Is it right ? May it 
cause a significative difference ?

Greetings from Strasbourg, France.

Herv? Polesi
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On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Herv? Polesi wrote:

            
The classInt package is open source, but ArcView/ArcGIS isn't (unless you 
consider the new python scripts, but I don't think these include class 
intervals). Is it possible to check in the ESRI documentation? I recall 
being told that the symbology is built on the fly and probably stored in 
the project, and that a sample is used instead of the total. If anyone 
has some students who'd like to deconstruct the ESRI approach by testing 
on known distributions, that might be fun. We have the Fisher code (as 
implemented), so seeing why things might differ ought to be possible.

Of course, there are very many different classifications anyway, even for 
moderate n and k.

Best wishes,

Roger

  
    
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Just found out a little about this in ArcGIS (ArcMap), version 9.1.
Yes, apparently with large datasets, the "natural breaks" classification
(and maybe others like quantile) does sample.  However, it is possible
to change the sample size by clicking the "Sampling" button in the
Classification window.  With 40,000 cases it was really slow, however.

For R users, Roger Bivand's response is more relevant.

r-sig-geo-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch wrote on 2007-03-16 04:08:42: