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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">AGILE-GISS</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>AGILE: GIScience Series</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">AGILE-GISS</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">AGILE GIScience Ser.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2700-8150</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/agile-giss-3-61-2022</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A regionalization method filtering out small-scale spatial fluctuations</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Spierenburg</surname>
<given-names>Lucas</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>van Cranenburgh</surname>
<given-names>Sander</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cats</surname>
<given-names>Oded</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Transport and Planning, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Transport and Logistics group, Department of Engineering Systems and Services, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>11</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2022</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>3</volume>
<elocation-id>61</elocation-id>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2022 Lucas Spierenburg et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2022</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/3/61/2022/agile-giss-3-61-2022.html">This article is available from https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/3/61/2022/agile-giss-3-61-2022.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/3/61/2022/agile-giss-3-61-2022.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/3/61/2022/agile-giss-3-61-2022.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Regionalization is the process of aggregating contiguous spatial units to form areas that are homogeneous with respect to one or a set of variables. It is useful when studying spatial phenomena or when designing region-based policies, as it allows to unravel the latent spatial structure of a dataset. However, this task is challenging when small-scale fluctuations in the data interfere with the phenomenon of interest. In such circumstances, regionalization techniques are prone to overfitting small-scale fluctuations, and producing erratic regions. This paper presents a regionalization method robust to small-scale variations that is particularly relevant when handling demographic data. Fluctuations are filtered out using a weighted spatial average before applying agglomerative clustering. The method is tested against a conventional agglomerative clustering approach on a fine-resolution demographic dataset, for a set of indicators quantifying: the ability to identify large-scale spatial patterns, the homogeneity of the regions produced, and the spatial regularity of these regions. These indicators have been computed for the two methods for a number of clusters ranging from 2 to 101, and results show that the proposed approach performs better than conventional agglomerative clustering more than 90% of the time at identifying large-scale patterns, and produces more regular regions 96% of the time.</p>
</abstract>
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