[GIS] Spatial Join (Point to Point Features)

Question

I have a shapefile (called Actuals) of 270,000+ point features with their actual X and Y coordinates and a road intersections shapefile (again with X and Y coordinates). Due to privacy reasons, I cannot report the actual locations and thus I need to report the Actuals based on the nearest road intersection. I'm using Spatial Join (with one to many as my join option and intersect as my match option and no search radius) to merge the two together. My output shapefile is short by 20,000 points. Once I have identified which ones are missing, is my option to add them back in manually?

I'm running ArcGIS 10.3 (basic license). I've tried other match options (closest, within etc.) but the results are even worse (returning 8000 points).

Answer 1

Your output should not be missing 20k points. Make sure you are using Spatial Join with join_operation=JOIN_ONE_TO_ONE, match_option=CLOSEST and try specifying a search_radius large enough to find all the points.

You could also try tool Generate Near Table with parameter location set to LOCATION then join the near table to the Actuals points (if this is what you want) which will give you the object id, coordinates of the nearest intersection and more.