Delineating Geographical Regions with Networks of Human Interactions in an Extensive Set of Countries
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Sobolevsky-2013-Delineating Geograph.pdf
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Author(s)
Sobolevsky, Stanislav
Szell, Michael
Campari, Riccardo
Smoreda, Zbigniew
Ratti, Carlo
Couronne, Thomas
Date Issued
December 2013
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Sobolevsky, Stanislav, Michael Szell, Riccardo Campari, Thomas Couronné, Zbigniew Smoreda, and Carlo Ratti. “Delineating Geographical Regions with Networks of Human Interactions in an Extensive Set of Countries.” Edited by Yamir Moreno. PLoS ONE 8, no. 12 (December 18, 2013): e81707.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging areas in a few recent studies on single regions have been suggested to share two distinct properties: first, they are cohesive, and second, they tend to closely follow socio-economic boundaries and are similar to existing political regions in size and number. Here we use an extended set of countries and clustering indices to quantify overlaps, providing ample additional evidence for these observations using phone data from countries of various scales across Europe, Asia, and Africa: France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Ivory Coast. In our analysis we use the known approach of partitioning country-wide networks, and an additional iterative partitioning of each of the first level communities into sub-communities, revealing that cohesiveness and matching of official regions can also be observed on a second level if spatial resolution of the data is high enough. The method has possible policy implications on the definition of the borderlines and sizes of administrative regions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SENSEable City Laboratory
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081707
