Relationship

Census tracts styled with a relationship renderer to show the geographic relationship between household size and home value

What is a relationship style?

A relationship style, also known as a bivariate choropleth map, allows you to explore the potential relationship between two numeric attributes. It overlays two sequential color schemes, each associated with a range of values to color features based on how each variable is classified in relation to the other.

Keep in mind that even if you observe a positive relationship between the two variables of interest, it doesn't mean they are statistically correlated. It also doesn't imply that the presence of one variable influences the other. Therefore, this renderer should be used judiciously with some prior knowledge that two variables may likely be related.

How relationship a style works

This renderer classifies each variable in either 2, 3, or 4 classes along separate color ramps. One of those ramps is rotated 90 degrees and overlaid on the other to create a 2x2, 3x3, or 4x4 square grid. The x-axis indicates the range of values for one variable, and the y-axis indicates the range for the second variable. The squares running diagonal from the lower left corner to the upper right corner indicate features where the two variables may be related or in agreement with one another.

The legend of a relationship renderer resembles a grid of two single-hue sequential color ramps overlaid on each other, forming a third hue along a diagonal line, which indicates where the two variables could potentially be related.

relationship-legend

The lower right and upper left corners indicate features where one field has high values and the other field low values and vice versa.

Code examples

3x3 grid

The following example shows the geographic relationship between average household size and average home value using a 3x3 relationship color scheme.

  • Blue corner - Areas where the average household size is large, but the average home size is small.
  • Orange corner - Areas where the average household size is small, but the average home size is large.
  • Brown corner - Areas where the average household size and the average home size are both large.
  • Light brown corner - Areas where the average household size and the average home size are both small.
ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript
Expand
Use dark colors for code blocksCopy
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
          const params = {
            layer: layer,
            view: view,
            field1: {
              field: "AVGHHSZ_CY",
              label: "Household size"
            },
            field2: {
              field: "AVGVAL_CY",
              label: "Home value"
            },
            focus: null,
            numClasses: 3,
            outlineOptimizationEnabled: true
          };

          return relationshipRendererCreator.createRenderer(params);

Your browser is no longer supported. Please upgrade your browser for the best experience. See our browser deprecation post for more details.