Compare methods

	Flow Mapping Analysis	Spatial Interaction Model
Field	Human Geography	Spatial analysis
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1987	1971
Originator	Flow cartography tradition (computer migration mapping by Waldo Tobler)	Alan Wilson (entropy-maximizing family)
Type	Cartographic technique for visualizing movement between origins and destinations	Model of flows between spatial origins and destinations
Seminal source	Tobler, W. (1987). Experiments in migration mapping by computer. The American Cartographer, 14(2), 155–163.	Wilson, A. G. (1971). A family of spatial interaction models, and associated developments. Environment and Planning A, 3(1), 1–32.
Aliases	Flow Map, Origin-Destination Mapping, Movement Mapping, Flow Cartography	gravity model, spatial interaction model, competing destinations model, mekânsal etkileşim modeli
Related	4	4
Summary	Flow mapping analysis visualizes movement between places — migrants, commuters, trade, traffic — by drawing the flows of an origin-destination matrix as lines on a map, with line width scaled to the volume moving along each link. It is the cartography of interaction: where choropleths show what is in a place, flow maps show what travels between places, and the central challenge is to reveal the dominant patterns of movement without the map dissolving into an unreadable tangle of crossing lines. The technique was put on a computational footing by Waldo Tobler's 1987 experiments in computer migration mapping, and modern methods add edge bundling, smoothing, and statistical filtering to manage visual complexity.	Spatial interaction models predict the volume of flows — migrants, commuters, shoppers, trade, trips — between origins and destinations as a function of the size of each place and the distance or cost separating them. By analogy to Newton's gravity, interaction rises with the 'mass' of origin and destination and falls with separation, and Wilson's 1971 entropy-maximizing family put these models on a rigorous footing for transport, migration, and retail analysis.