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Post Offices Analysis of Abu Dhabi City
Ziad Samhan
October 20, 2019
Table of Contents
1. Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
1.1. Background................................................................................................................................. 2
1.2. Problem.......................................................................................................................................2
1.3. Interest........................................................................................................................................2
2. Data acquisition and cleaning...............................................................................................................2
2.1. Data sources................................................................................................................................2
2.2. Data Cleaning.............................................................................................................................. 2
3. Methodology......................................................................................................................................... 4
4. Results..................................................................................................................................................12
5. Discussion............................................................................................................................................ 12
6. Conclusion............................................................................................................................................13
7. References........................................................................................................................................... 13

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1. Introduction
1.1. Background
Abu Dhabi is the largest emirate in the United Arab Emirates, occupying 84 percent of the national
landmass territory. It has 200 islands and a long coastline stretching 700km. Its total area is 67,340 sq.
km. Abu Dhabi city in the emirate is the federal capital of the UAE.,The emirate of Abu Dhabi lies on
the coast of the Arabian Gulf and is bordered by Sultanate of Oman to the east, the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia to the south and the west and the emirate of Dubai to the northeast. The three main regions
of the emirate are: The city of Abu Dhabi, Al Ain in the east, Al Dhafrah (earlier known as Al Gharbia)
in the west, For this analysis I will concentrate in ��The city of Abu Dhabi��[1]
1.2. Problem
Determining the best location for new post office requires analysis of current post offices
distribution and population distribution within the ��city of Abu Dhabi��. However I was not able
to gather data for population distribution within The ��city of Abu Dhabi�� Neighborhood wise, so I
will use current offices with 2.5 Km radius as a coverage area for the post office.
1.3. Interest
Having more post offices means more coverage and less load for the currently operating offices, I
will examine neighborhoods without post offices to try to determine best locations with
minimum offices for the uncovered neighborhoods.
2. Data acquisition and cleaning
2.1. Data sources
For the analysis, I was able to gather data from post offices and neighborhoods using:
- Bayanat.ae, the official data portal of the UAE Government[2]
- Forsquare API, to get post offices of city of Abu Dhabi.
-BeautifulSoup4, for pulling neighborhoods from Wikipedia page containing list of neighborhoods
of the city of Abu Dhabi[3]
-Nominatim, to convert neighborhoods�� addressess into latitude and longitude.
-I used Google Map, to get the coordinates for some of neighborhoods.
2.2. Data Cleaning
I have obtained 25 post office locations from ��bayanat.ae��[4] covering Abu Dhabi emirate, where
our interest is the city of Abu Dhabi. And since I was not able to obtain a Second-level
Administrative Divisions of Abu Dhabi, I have dropped locations which located more than 50Km
from Abu Dhabi City center, and International Airport Post Office was dropped since it is limited
for Airport usage, so I ended up with 15 post Offices from ��Bayanat.ae�� and 16 from Forsquare.
Plotted Post Office locations, Blue circles represent locations obtain using Forsquare, where
Orange circles are locations obtain from ��Bayant.ae��, as I found out some duplicates and some
missing locations from Forsquare.

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Al Bateen Post Office Abu Dhabi Central Post Office Hamdan Post Office
Al Khaldiyah Post Office Chamber of Commerce Post
Office
Shabiyat Musafah Post Office
Since Bayanat.ae data was more accurate than Forsquare, I have decided to use ��Bayanat.ae��
data for the rest of my analysis.
To obtain and clean up neighborhoods of the City of Abu Dhabi, I have Used BeautifulSoup4 to
pull data out of Wikipedia page, containing a list of neighborhoods of the City of Abu Dhabi, I
ended up with 43 neighborhoods.
�� (page does not exist)�� was found in some neighborhoods�� names, and it was cleaned up.
I dropped ��Al Qubesat�� and ��Al Rehhan�� as I was unable to obtain accurate or even clear location
for them.
For some neighborhoods, I was unable to get the geolocation using Nominatim, for 5 of them it
was due to spelling differences.
The list of neighborhoods below was changed to be able to obtain geolocation using Nominatim
for them:
Name New Name
Al Karama Al Karamah
Al Maqtaa Al Maqta
Al Meena Al Mina
Al Moroor Al Muroor
Al Khalidyah al khalidiya

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For the rest of the neighborhoods, I have used Google map to search and obtain the
GeoLocations:
Neighborhood Lat Long
Al Manaseer [5] 24.453333 54.363889
Al Muzoon [6] 24.4081379 54.4338398
Al Ras Al Akhdar [7] 24.4596244 54.3190142
Bani Yas [8] 24.3063479 54.5995936
Al Zaab [9] 24.4667598 54.356339
Hideriyyat [10] 24.417739 54.3576465
Marina Village [11] 24.4772307 54.3179553
Qasr El Shatie [12] 24.4261292 54.380629
Al Samha [13] 24.695833 54.676111
Missing neighborhoods Added Manually
Al Bahyah [14] 24.547706 54.6628323
Al Shahama [15] 24.524108 54.6770834
Al Rahbah [16] 24.605807 54.6944333
3. Methodology
Before we can suggest a new post office location, we have to know what we currently have and
how post offices cover Abu Dhabi city neighborhoods.
It was decided to use radius of 2500m for coverage, so, for current post offices I have calculated
the total neighborhoods within 2500m radius, and for the neighborhoods I have calculated total
post offices within the same radius of 2500m.
I used python folium library to visualize geographic details of Abu dhabi City, its neighborhoods
and post offices with coverage.

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For analyzing current coverage, I have used unsupervised learning K-means algorithm to cluster
the neighborhoods. K-Means algorithm is one of the most common cluster methods of
unsupervised learning. First, I will run K-Means to cluster the neighborhoods into 3 clusters
because when I analyzed the K-Means with Elbow method, it assured me the 3 degrees for
optimum k of the K-Means.

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Below is the neighborhoods table with Cluster:
Count of neighborhoods per cluster:
I continued with the 20 neighborhoods within cluster 2 (with no or zero post offices covered),
created a new data-frame for them, and visualized them using folium library:

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I have used K-Mean algorithm to cluster the neighborhoods, aiming minimum post offices with
maximum neighborhoods coverage, elbow method ensured that 4 degree for optimum k of the
K-Means.

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Visualizing clustered neighborhoods on map:
Using ��cluster_centers_�� as suggested post office location, I created a function to include
covered neighborhoods within 2500m radius of suggested post office locations and ended up
having only 1 neighborhood covered.

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As I was aiming to have minimum post offices with maximum neighborhoods coverage, 4 clusters
did not achieve the needed result, so, based on K-Mean Algorithm, I have created a function to
calculate the maximum coverage with minimum clusters (post offices) and ended up with 15
clusters (post offices) to cover 20 uncovered neighborhoods.

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0/15 Suggested Post Office(s) with no neighborhoods Covered.
15/15 Suggested Post Office(s) fully cover their clustered neighborhoods.
11/15 Suggested Post Office(s) cover 1 Neighborhood.

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4. Results
Started with the radius of 2.5 Km for coverage, I have used unsupervised learning K-means
algorithm to cluster to the 20 uncovered neighborhoods into 4 clusters because when I analyzed
the K-Means with elbow method it assured me the 4 degree for optimum k of the K-Means.
However 4 k cluster resulted in only 1 neighborhood being covered, further analysis indicated
that 15 clusters will cover all of the 20 uncovered neighborhoods.
5. Discussion
As included in the introduction section, determining the best location for new post offices
requires more than geoLocations. Demographic information will add a major factor for
suggesting a location, and even the number of post offices within each neighborhood, which may
be the reason that we have around 30 post offices within Abu Dhabi city central (downtown), as
the population / companies are to found more inside it.
Second-level Administrative Divisions are another data needed for a better analysis and
suggestion of a location, which can help us locate post office(s) within neighborhood boundaries,
for example, some suggested locations are not accurate, as in Cluster 2; the suggested location
was to cover ��Al Bahyah�� and ��Al Shahama�� neighborhoods, however, it resulted in covering
partial parts of them. Another example can be found in cluster 3, where the suggested location
covering 3 neighborhoods was located on coast.

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6. Conclusion
It is clear that more post offices do not necessarily mean more or better coverage, determining
the location of a new post office will indeed depend on the study and analysis of demographic
data.
7. References
[1] The Official Portal of the UAE Government
https://www.government.ae/en/about-the-uae/the-seven-emirates/abu-dhabi
[2] The official data portal of the UAE Government, https://bayanat.ae/en
[3] Abu Dhabi - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi
[4] Emirates post offices GIS location
http://data.bayanat.ae/en_GB/dataset/emirates-post-offices-gis-location
[5] Google Maps

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