Nicholas Sokol
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Data ScienceGISSpatial Statistics

Spatial Market Intelligence & Risk Scoring Engine

A multi-dimensional site-selection and market-vitality scoring engine blending census demographics, infrastructure connectivity, and cultural/commercial density into a single spatial index.

A scoring engine for evaluating geographic areas — census tracts, custom trade areas, arbitrary polygons — on economic vitality and market opportunity, built around a multi-criteria framework spanning geography, culture, economics, identity, and accessibility.

The hardest problem in a multi-criteria index like this isn't picking weights — it's collinearity. An early version of the culture dimension was, in practice, a near-restatement of the economics dimension, which meant the index was quietly double-counting one signal instead of measuring two independent ones. Blending in independent civic and cultural data as its own signal brought that cross-dimension correlation down substantially.

What it does

  • Scores arbitrary geographies on a blended, decorrelated multi-criteria index
  • Runs sensitivity analysis on the scoring weights
  • Checks for spatial autocorrelation and dimension independence before trusting a score

Engineering notes

  • Python research toolkit: dimensionality reduction, spatial autocorrelation diagnostics, Census ACS integration
  • Fixed score saturation and non-deterministic tie-breaking in the ranking layer