ISSN 2079-3537      

 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             





Scientific Visualization, 2021, volume 13, number 5, pages 1 - 15, DOI: 10.26583/sv.13.5.01

Dendrograms in Regional Socio-Economic Analysis: Interpretation and Verification

Author: V.I. Blanutsa1

V.B. Sochava Institute of Geography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

1 ORCID: 0000-0003-3958-216X, blanutsa@list.ru

 

Abstract

Interest in regional socio-economic analysis has grown in the last decade. Various tools are used to visualize its results. One of them is the dendrogram. However, there is no generalization of the experience of using dendrograms to display the sequence of combining regions into socio-economic clusters in world science. Therefore, the goal of our study was to generalize such experience with an emphasis on the interpretation and verification of dendrograms. Based on eight bibliographic databases using a special semantic search algorithm, more than eighty journal articles published around the world in the last two decades have been identified. These articles contain one hundred and thirty dendrograms. Their analysis showed that the main purpose of tree diagrams is to fix the sequence of combining regions into clusters and to substantiate the number of clusters. Two new types of interpretation of dendrograms are proposed – the allocation of nuclei in clusters and the determination of the level of socio-economic cohesion of clusters. To test the validity of determining the number of clusters, the author's algorithm for identifying the optimal clustering option is proposed, based on the idea of the complexity of the tree in graph theory. The ten main problems of visualizing the results of regional socio-economic analysis using dendrograms are listed.

 

Keywords: regional economy, regional analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, regional economic convergence, socio-economic regionalization, dendrogram, interpretation, verification.