Delineating geographical regions with networks of human interactions in an extensive set of countries.

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

SUBMITTER: Sobolevsky S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3867326 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature