Today I read a paper titled “Hubs and Clusters in the Evolving U. S. Internal Migration Network”
The abstract is:
Most nations of the world periodically publish N x N origin-destination tables, recording the number of people who lived in geographic subdivision i at time t and j at t+1.
We have developed and widely applied to such national tables and other analogous (weighted, directed) socioeconomic networks, a two-stage–double-standardization and (strong component) hierarchical clustering–procedure.
Previous applications of this methodology and related analytical issues are discussed.
Its use is illustrated in a large-scale study, employing recorded United States internal migration flows between the 3,000+ county-level units of the nation for the periods 1965-1970 and 1995-2000.
Prominent, important features–such as ”cosmopolitan hubs” and “functional regions”–are extracted from master dendrograms.
The extent to which such characteristics have varied over the intervening thirty years is evaluated.