Non-Uniform Gaussian Blur of Hexagonal Bins in Cartesian Coordinates

Abstract: In a recent application of the Bokeh Python library for visualizing physico-chemical properties of chemical entities text-mined from the scientific literature, we found ourselves facing the task of smoothing hexagonally binned data in Cartesian coordinates. To the best of our knowledge, no documentation for how to do this exist in the public domain. This short paper shows how to accomplish this in general and for Bokeh in particular. We illustrate the method with a real-world example and discuss some potential advantages of using hexagonal bins in these and similar applications.