SAS and D3.js (3): draw a map to display US cities' murder rates

Robert Allison has given an excellent map example by SAS/GRAPH about the murder rates per 100,000 people in the major US cities. To emulate this map, we should annotate the cities and use the size of the bubbles to represent the murder rates.

Comparing with the GRAPH module in SAS, the SVG based map on a webpage may have some advantages: first the maps will not lose details when zoomed out; second the JSON-formatted raw map data can be easily created to reflected the latest change; third with some more JavaScript attached the map on the HTML file can be empowered with dynamic effects.

1. Input raw data and transform SAS d to JSON 
I only choose the top 20 most violent cities, since I have to manually enter the coordinates data including longitude and latitude. Then I transform them to JSON format. To label all cities from the EXCEL file, a better way is to use R's ggmap package to automate the process of fetching the coordinates.

data top20;
input @1 City $11.    @14 State $2.    @17 Murder_rate @22 rank
@26 coordinates $50.;
cards;
New York     NY    471     1   -74.0059731,40.7143528
Chicago      IL    458     2   -87.6297982,41.8781136
Detroit      MI    363     3   -83.0457538,42.331427 
Los Angeles  CA    312     4   -118.2436849,34.0522342
Philadelphi  PA    302     5   -75.163789,39.952335 
Houston      TX    287     6   -95.3693896,29.7601927
Baltimore    MD    238     7   -76.6121893,39.2903848
New Orleans  LA    174     8   -90.0715323,29.9510658
Dallas       TX    166     9   -96.8004511,32.7801399
Washington   DC    144     10  -77.0363658,38.8951118
Saint Louis  MO    143     11  -90.296630859375, 38.74337300148123
Memphis      TN    132     12  -90.0489801, 35.1495343
Phoenix      AZ    122     13  -112.0740373, 33.4483771
Las Vegas    NV    111     14  -115.172816, 36.114646
Oakland      CA    104     15  -122.2711137, 37.8043637
Kansas City  MO    100     16  -94.5785667, 39.0997265
San Antonio  TX     99     17  -98.4936282, 29.4241219
Indianapolis IN     99     18  -86.1579557, 39.7685825
Jacksonville FL     99     19  -81.655651, 30.3321838
Cleveland    OH     83     20  -81.6954088, 41.4994954
;;;
run;

data top20_json(keep=string);
    set top20 nobs = nobs;
    length string $300.;
    _coordinates = cats('"coordinates":[', coordinates, ']},');
    _properties = cats('"properties":{"name":"', city, '","murder_rate":', Murder_rate, '}},');
    string = cats('{"type":"Feature","geometry":{"type":"Point",',_coordinates, _properties);
    if _n_ = nobs then substr(string, length(string), 1) = ' ';
run;

2. Draw the map and label the cities
D3.js provides the basic us-states.json data. The only thing that needs to do is to attache the cities' murder rate data to the HTML codes. A modern browser such as Chrome will compile the codes and generate the physical map.