Visualizing German Unemployment with Infomaps in R

At the R You Ready blog, there's yet another look at creating choropleth maps, following on from last week's challenge to visualize US unemployment data in a color-coded map. This time around, the map is for German Unemployment. There are a couple of twists to the process though: this time, the map comes from GADM, and the data-matching problems are solved with fuzzy matching (via the agrep function). The result: beautiful.

R You Ready: Infomaps using R – Visualizing German unemployment rates by district on a map (via @paulblaser)

Comments

[ChristianK]

The map doesn't look right Berlins unemployemnt numbers are at the moment 14.2% http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/Arbeitslose-Arbeitslosenzahl-Konjunktur-Berliner-Arbeitsmarkt;art270,2859926 but that map says 5-7.5%

[Gaël Laurans]

In fact there are many problems with this map. Berlin is indeed marked as 2.5-5 % instead of 16.1 in the original dataset. Plenty of data is missing in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. The data from Saxony is missing from the original dataset but the data from Saxony-Anhalt is not found because the district map is not up-to-date (the number of districts in Saxony-Anhalt has been halved in 2007). Because of that the matching is messy and even the districts that are apparently found can be completely wrong. For example Ohrekreis (NW from Magdeburg) is also in the 2.5-5% category, which is obviously incorrect (it does not exist in the dataset and had over 10% unemployment both before the reform and, together with Bördekreis as Landkreis Börde, after it).