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Ciara Spencer edited this page Jul 31, 2024 · 10 revisions

Introduction to Geospatial Data Processing Pipeline for U.S. PPP Loan Program Analysis

Welcome to the documentation for our geospatial data processing pipeline, designed to analyze and visualize data from the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loan Program using a map-style analysis application. This pipeline is a powerful tool that allows us to harness the potential of geospatial data to gain valuable insights into the distribution and impact of PPP loans across geographical regions.

Background: U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loan Program

The U.S. PPP Loan Program was initiated to provide financial relief to businesses affected by economic challenges, with a particular focus on supporting payroll and maintaining jobs. This program has generated a vast amount of data, including loan recipient information, loan amounts, business locations, and other relevant details.

Objective: Utilizing Geospatial Insights

Our primary goal with this pipeline is to process the PPP loan data, which includes geospatial references such as business addresses, and convert it into actionable insights through geospatial analysis. By visualizing loan distribution, loan amounts, and other key metrics on a map-style analysis application, we can better understand the program's impact on different regions and identify patterns that may be crucial for policymakers, researchers, and businesses alike.

Pipeline Highlights:

  1. Data Collection and Integration: We start by gathering PPP loan data from official sources, ensuring data integrity, and integrating additional relevant datasets if necessary. This forms the foundation of our analysis.

  2. Geospatial Data Enrichment: The pipeline employs geocoding techniques to convert business addresses into precise geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) using Google Geocoding API. This geospatial enrichment enables us to accurately position businesses on the map.

  3. Data Transformation and Cleaning: Data quality is essential for meaningful analysis. We perform data cleaning and transformation steps, handling missing or erroneous data to ensure accurate results.

  4. Geospatial Bounds Enhancement: Maximizing full use of our coordinate data for each business, we obtain FIPS codes in order to identify geographic boundaries (state, country, block, and block group) for each data point.

  5. Geospatial Analysis: Leveraging libraries like GeoPandas with TIGERLine ShapeFiles, we conduct powerful geospatial operations such as spatial joins, aggregations, and clustering. These techniques will help us unveil geographical trends and relationships within the data.

  6. Database Creation and Management: We create a geospatially enabled database using a robust database management system, AWS S3 with CloudFront distribution. This advanced storage and authorization-based retrieval method enhances processing of geospatial data in production from any remote client.

  7. Map-Style Analysis Application: Our pipeline integrates with a map-style analysis application, allowing users to interactively explore and visualize enriched geospatial PPP loan data from our stored database using libraries such as MapBox, Leaflet, turf.js, and ESRI. Users can filter, query, and generate insights tailored to their specific needs.

  8. Performance Optimization: To ensure efficient processing, we implement performance optimization techniques, especially crucial for large-scale geospatial data. The processing pipeline is designed for the fast retrieval of external resources through available APIs and public databases. Structural choices ensure that the resultant database enhances performance in the client GUI.

  9. Scalability and Future Expansion: Our pipeline is designed with scalability in mind. As more PPP loan data becomes available or new geospatial analysis requirements emerge, the pipeline can be extended and adapted accordingly.

Conclusion: Unlocking Geospatial Insights

By implementing this geospatial data processing pipeline and integrating it with a map-style analysis application, we empower stakeholders to gain geospatial insights from the U.S. PPP Loan Program data. This, in turn, contributes to informed decision-making, impactful policy changes, and a deeper understanding of how economic support initiatives impact various regions across the United States.

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