Is it okay to round-off latitude or longitude data?

General
1

Let's say, I have a dataset of ride details of ridesharing enterprise. The records contain details of each ride for one month like ride id, start time, end time etc.. There is a column for latitude and one for longitude. And this lats and long data have different decimal places.

Say, some records have latitude data upto 2 decimal place, some records have data upto 7 decimal places and the number of decimal places in each cell is totally random.

I am new to Analytics and I want to understand:

  1. What things should be kept in mind before rounding off these values?
  2. I will be plotting latitudes and longitudes in scatter plot, so how many decimal places to keep ?
    [there is no accuracy column in the dataset]
2

Hi there,

So the number of decimals matter a whole lot when it comes to long/lat values. As you can see here: Decimal degrees - GIS Wiki | The GIS Encyclopedia

From what I have seen most people try to retain at least 4 or more. I probably wouldn't round if I can help it - I'd say I would round to the 5th decimal if I am really forced to. It all depends on what you need to accomplish

There are better visuals than a scatter plot to plot this by. I suggest have a look at leaflet (see here: Leaflet for R - Introduction ) etc.

1 Like
3

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

If you have a query related to it or one of the replies, start a new topic and refer back with a link.