An LLM Agent for Automatic Geospatial Data Analysis

Abstract: LLMs are being used in data science code generation tasks, but they often struggle with complex sequential tasks, leading to logical errors. Their application to geospatial data processing is particularly challenging due to difficulties in incorporating complex data structures and spatial constraints, effectively utilizing diverse function calls, and the tendency to hallucinate less-used geospatial libraries. To tackle these problems, we introduce GeoAgent, a new interactive framework designed to help LLMs handle geospatial data processing more effectively. GeoAgent pioneers the integration of a code interpreter, static analysis, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques within a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, offering a novel approach to geospatial data processing. In addition, we contribute a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the LLM-based approach in geospatial tasks. This benchmark leverages a variety of Python libraries and includes both single-turn and multi-turn tasks such as data acquisition, data analysis, and visualization. By offering a comprehensive evaluation among diverse geospatial contexts, this benchmark sets a new standard for developing LLM-based approaches in geospatial data analysis tasks. Our findings suggest that relying solely on knowledge of LLM is insufficient for accurate geospatial task programming, which requires coherent multi-step processes and multiple function calls. Compared to the baseline LLMs, the proposed GeoAgent has demonstrated superior performance, yielding notable improvements in function calls and task completion. In addition, these results offer valuable insights for the future development of LLM agents in automatic geospatial data analysis task programming.