10.1080/13658810600665111
https://zenodo.org/records/3832352
oai:zenodo.org:3832352
Assuncao, Renato
Renato
Assuncao
UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais)
Neves, Marcos
Marcos
Neves
EMBRAPA (Brazilian Agricutural Research Agency)
Camara, Gilberto
Gilberto
Camara
0000-0002-3681-487X
INPE (National Institute for Space Research), Brazil
Freitas, Corina
Corina
Freitas
INPE (National Institute for Space Research), Brazil
Efficient regionalization techniques for socio-economic geographical units using minimum spanning trees
Zenodo
2007
Regionalization, Constrained clustering, Graph partitioning, Optimization, Zone design, Census data analysis
2007-02-20
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Regionalization is a classification procedure applied to spatial objects with an areal representation, which groups them into homogeneous contiguous regions. This paper presents an efficient method for regionalization. The first step creates a connectivity graph that captures the neighbourhood relationship between the spatial objects. The cost of each edge in the graph is inversely proportional to the similarity between the regions it joins. We summarize the neighbourhood structure by a minimum spanning tree (MST), which is a connected tree with no circuits. We partition the MST by successive removal of edges that link dissimilar regions. The result is the division of the spatial objects into connected regions that have maximum internal homogeneity. Since the MST partitioning problem is NP-hard, we propose a heuristic to speed up the tree partitioning significantly. Our results show that our proposed method combines performance and quality, and it is a good alternative to other regionalization methods found in the literature.