Challenge #431: Ice Cream Road Trip – Summer Edition

Hi Maveryx,

A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.

Roland (@RWvanLeeuwen) submitted this challenge as a follow-on to our Valentine’s Day spatial challenge, and solving it now is a great way to celebrate summer in the northern hemisphere. Thank you, Roland, for submitting another great challenge!

In Challenge #413 you applied your data analytics skills to help your friends visit as many ice cream shops as possible, including those that served a particular ice cream flavor. However, your friends are now worried about all the caloric intake, and for the next road trip they want to add some balance by focusing on store locations that are somewhat clustered together so you can all ride your bicycles to the ice cream shops instead!

Note: This challenge helps us check whether a group of shops might be located on the border of multiple states. We need to eliminate the limitation that the closest stores have to be located in the same state. Additionally, the bike ride you and your friends plan to take has specific distance parameters that you all believe will work best.

Your tasks for this challenge:

Create grids with cells that are 1 mile in size, and for each grid, find the 100 nearest ice cream shops within a 40-mile radius.
Select the grid cells that have at least 10 ice cream shops.
Select the 100 grid cells with the lowest average distance between the shops and the grid cell location.

Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up:

Good luck!

AYX-Maveryx_Micro Identity-Maveryx Academy_wordmark.png

Challenge_431_start_file.yxzp

Challenge_431_solution file.yxzp

Spatial Analysis

Advanced

Intermediate

Accepted answers

All comments

alexnajm

I am assuming it can be any point we want correct @AYXAcademy? I misunderstood, apologies. I hate that the defect came in where you can't customize the Find Nearest maximum distance without editing the XML 😞

I finally got the answer though!

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NOTE THE GRID TOOL REPEATS GRID NAMES - so make sure to group on the state too

Challenge_431_start_file_alex Abi-Najm.yxzp

mmontgomery

The most challenging question I've had to answer related to ice cream

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c431.yxzp

RolandSchubert

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Bug in Find Nearest tool in 2024.1, had to change the distance and number using control parameters.

Send DataSend Data

Challenge_431_solution_rsc.yxzp

olga_strubbe

Thank you @RWvanLeeuwen and @AYXAcademy. This was a neat spatial challenge. Love the ice cream topic, especially the summer edition when the temperatures are climbing .

See my solution attached. Would be nice to have the spatial data for the lakes/water polygons to subtract them out from the final output, as it looks like some of the shops ended on the water, lol! I welcome your solution to that.

challenge 431_OS.yxmd

ggruccio

Mine looks slightly different than the answer, but very close - it looks like in posting this I may have the same answer as others. I had forgotten how long it takes to run some of the spatial tools and removed the spatial fields in the output of the Find Nearest tool to conserve memory. Added them back to get the map.,

Had to use 23.1 because 23.2 wouldn't let me edit the Find Nearest tool to custom values.

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Challenge_431_gg_finish.yxzp

Kenda

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Challenge_431_start_file.yxmd

DaisukeTsuchiya

I spent some time to get the results.

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I forgot to include state in grouping. My results is similar but somehow different.

Challenge_431_start_file_DT.yxzp

RWvanLeeuwen

Sooo.. Maybe the next step is to calculate the travel distance from each grid as starting point and calculating the total caloric intake versus the calories consumed as fuel for biking?

Anyways: this is what I'd build today for this challenge:

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I thought it would be neat to visualise the average distance of the stores within reach and this prompts another question: do we want to bike further and eat more ice cream, or is it okay for us to visit "just" 10 stores although they are closer to each other

Challenge_431_start_file - RWvL.yxmd

RWvanLeeuwen

well yes this may be so @mmontgomery but this analysis can be easily translated to customers (or to pubs for that matter) - hope you had fun!

ahsanaali

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Spatials are deceptively special. 😥

Challenge_431_Solution_AAA.yxmd

Qiu

Not fully match with the provided answer.

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Challenge_431_start_file-Qiu.yxzp

LBishop011

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Took about a year to process all the grid locations every time but finally got it sorted.

Challenge_431_start_file.yxmd

Flo_P

Also not fully aligned but happy enough with it

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Challenge_431_Solved_FPER.yxzp

AkimasaKajitani

My solution!

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Challenge_431_start_file_AK.yxzp

Qiu

Get hint from @AkimasaKajitani and learned about "Clip to Polygons" feature in the "Make Grid" tool.

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Challenge_431_start_file-Qiu-r1.yxzp

alacoume

It was long to run and i wonder why the nearest tool is not that flexible in the calibration..

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Challenge_431_start_file.yxmd

RashedDS

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Challenge_431_RashedDS.yxzp

DataNath

My solution to #431.

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Challenge 431 completed.yxmd

balajilolla2

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Solution Attached

Screenshot 2024-07-08 114116.jpg

Challenge_431_start_file.yxmd

ed_hayter

neat challenge

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Challenge_431_start_file.yxzp

tammybrown_tds

Fun spatial challenge...but I'm not sure that I would want ride my bike through all of those Chicago grids.

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Challenge_431_tbrown.yxmd

RWvanLeeuwen

Hi there @tammybrown_tds
The basic idea would be to select one of those grids as to book a place to stay in that location, and to use that location to bike towards all those ice cream stores that are in the vicinity, and circle back to our resting point.

Hope this makes sense. Cheers!

RWvanLeeuwen

Hi @ahsanaali
If you were referencing the ice cream store that is located in the middle of Lake Michigan, then yes this dataset is quite special :-)

If you want to tidy the dataset, you can try and filter the ice cream stores to keep only those stores that are within the boundaries of the state shape? If those shapes fairly resemble the land mass, you might consider using a spatial tool to filter the stores to only relevant locations.

patrick_digan

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Challenge_431_start_file.yxmd

mkeiffer

@alexnajm Can you walk me through how to adjust/change the XML code so I can customize the How Many Nearest Points to Find and the Maximum Distance values in the Find Nearest Tool? Thanks so much in advance for your help!