mapclassify.Natural_Break() does not return the specified k classes

[mingchau]

Hi,

I use mapclassfiy.Natural_Break() to produce bins for my MapBox heatmap.

My code like this:
df = pd.read_table('./files_output/customer_qty.txt',sep=',',header=None).iloc[:,1]
mapclassify.Natural_Breaks(df.iloc[:,1], k=5)

In my thought it should return 5 classes, but it only returned 3 classes

.
The output is:

Natural_Breaks

Lower Upper Count
=============================================
x[i] <= 1.000 54428
1.000 < x[i] <= 26.000 2475
26.000 < x[i] <= 212.000 66

Attachment is the customer_qty.txt data file.
customer_qty.txt

[weikang9009]

Thank you for opening the issue.

I think the problem lies in the kmeans function from scipy used in mapclassify.Natural_Breaks to cluster the input data. This issue is related to issues 1 and 2 opened in stackoverflow. The point is that k-means can fail in the sense that clusters can disappear if no data points are assigned to a cluster center in the iterative process. Therefore, a smarter initial selection of cluster center is important and one such initial smarter selection is implemented in sklearn (init=’k-means++’). I think it makes sense to switch from scipy to sklearn to make sure that the returned number of classification is identical to the number specified in the input @sjsrey @ljwolf ?