Clustering and Scaling of Transaction Flow Tables: A French Interdepartmental Migration Example
Slater, P, Winchester, H · IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics · 1978
Measures of functional linkages between analytical units are obtainable from transaction flow tables with the use of theiterative proportional fitting procedure (IPFP). Two quite differentapproaches-directed graph-based hierarchical clustering and robustmetric multidimensional scaling-for the summarization of largetables of these measures can be taken. The results of the clusteringare particularly responsive to strong linkages, while those from thescaling are more sensitive to weak ties. Residuals from both modelsindicate the adequacy with which the flow patterns are explained.The scaling method can be used to study the residuals fromthe clustering. These procedures are illustrated through the study of a 1954-1962 French interdepartmental migration table.