Post Spring Break Update (All Work Through 3.22.20)

Update of What Has Been Done:

The last time I updated the class was the Monday before Spring Break, so I will try not to repeat myself too much. That being said, I was having difficulties utilizing Geopy in Python, so over Spring Break I switched over to Mathematica and it was much easier. After taking into consideration looking at the distribution of hospitals across the United States, I found a current complete list of all hospitals (~7,500 entries), whereas the Data I was using in regards to medicare costs, had about 2,700 data points.

Here is my graph of every single Hospital’s Data Point:

graph1

Additionally, here is a graph of the population distribution across the United States, according to the last census.

graph2

These two graphs looked nearly identical to me, so I didn’t necessarily find the need to use geometric clustering for this. For my next step, I am going to graph the data that I was given with the medicare costs and see if those 2700 points are a good representation of the overall hospitals.

Next Step:

After noticing that the distribution of hospitals closely resembles the general population, I want to start considering the cost distribution and how it relates to geographic position. In order to do this I will first create a heat map of all points, but then I want to utilize geometric clustering for either the top 100 or 500 highest costs of the surgery and the lowest and look to see how those cluster. Are city areas with the highest costs or is it the more rural areas, with only one or two major hospitals in a 100 mile radius.

What I am Having Trouble With:

I’ve never used Mathematica before this project, and although it is fairly straightforward, I feel like I am missing certain things. For example, the second data I have with the medicare costs, doesn’t have lat & long coordinates. I know how to use FindGeoLocation[ ” ” ] to find one coordinate, but I don’t know how to use my file “HosptialAddresses”  or “HospitalNames” to find every coordinate.

Here is my current Mathematica Notebook, in case you were unable to view the graphs of distribution across the United States:

Plot