DUGi

Discovering similarities in the time use patterns of the Spanish Autonomous Communities by Fuzzy techniques

http://dugi.udg.edu/item/http:@@@@hdl.handle.net@@2072@@14750

In 2000 the European Statistical Office published the guidelines for developing theHarmonized European Time Use Surveys system. Under such a unified framework,the first Time Use Survey of national scope was conducted in Spain during 2002–03. The aim of these surveys is to understand human behavior and the lifestyle ofpeople. Time allocation data are of compositional nature in origin, that is, they aresubject to non-negativity and constant-sum constraints. Thus, standard multivariatetechniques cannot be directly applied to analyze them. The goal of this work is toidentify homogeneous Spanish Autonomous Communities with regard to the typicalactivity pattern of their respective populations. To this end, fuzzy clustering approachis followed. Rather than the hard partitioning of classical clustering, where objects areallocated to only a single group, fuzzy method identify overlapping groups of objectsby allowing them to belong to more than one group. Concretely, the probabilistic fuzzyc-means algorithm is conveniently adapted to deal with the Spanish Time Use Surveymicrodata. As a result, a map distinguishing Autonomous Communities with similaractivity pattern is drawn.Key words: Time use data, Fuzzy clustering; FCM; simplex space; Aitchison distance

Geologische Vereinigung; Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya; International Association for Mathematical Geology; Càtedra Lluís Santaló d’Aplicacions de la Matemàtica; Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Recerca; Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; Ingenio 2010.

Universitat de Girona. Departament d’Informàtica i Matemàtica Aplicada