Page 299 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4

CPS2230 Braden P. et al.
While not a particularly strong correlation (r = 0.21), the rate of thefts totaling
over $5,000 also increases with the GDP per capita. A strong outlier here are
the Northwest Territories which have the highest GDP per capita and one of
the lowest theft rates.

6. Discussion
We have created simplified ready-to-use shapefiles for the vast majority of
countries in the world, including countries in North and South America, Africa,
Europe, and Asia. It is our goal to create an R package that exists as a data
repository for the storage on not only these proposed shapefiles, but the
documentation for each country showing the exact changes that were made
from the original shapefiles.
It is to be understood that the modifications made during the creation of
our R package are recommendations and may not represent the best way to
display the regions in the countries in question. For this purpose, we will
include multiple ways for users to further modify the shapefiles we will provide,
or start from scratch with their own shapefiles. The methods for further
modification will be an approach using data tables in R, or through a Shiny
app [5], included in our R package.
Due to some geographic limitations, not every country in the world will be
included in our R package initially. Countries, such as Chile, that cover a larger
range in the latitudinal direction than the longitudinal direction will be
excluded as the current formatting for LMplots is not optimal for these shapes.
Countries that are archipelagos consisting of many small islands will also be
excluded. Countries with less than five administrative regions at the selected
level will also be excluded as a LMplot would not be a meaningful way to
display spatial patterns for so few regions. Lastly, it should be noted that due
to the technical capabilities of data structures used in the R ‘micromap’
package, countries that contain one or more regions that are entirely
surrounded by another single region will also be excluded until a solution is
found for this limitation.

7. Conclusion
With new advancements, such as ‘rmapshaper’, the modification of
shapefiles is more accessible than it ever has been. With tools such as these,
shapefiles can be prepared on a large scale and can easily address issues that
exist within the geography captured in the shapefile. As shapefiles are
provided ready-to-use in our R package, linked micromap plots can be created
and used to display spatial data alongside statistical data.

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