Heat Map using Count Field in QGIS?

Question

I'm currently trying to plot a heat map of a large data set, where each position element has an additional attribute that corresponds to a count of occurrences (let's call it n_i).

I want these counts to be taken into account in the density estimate. I guess an easy approach would be to duplicate each of the elements n_i times. However, as the data set is pretty large already, I would like to avoid duplication.

Is that possible in QGIS without much data pre-processing?

Answer 1

According to the documentation, there is a Use weight from field option that you can specify your occurence field. Quoting the documentation:

This can be used to increase the influence certain features have on the resultant heatmap.