Discovering similarities in the time use patterns of the Spanish Autonomous Communities by Fuzzy techniques
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In 2000 the European Statistical Office published the guidelines for developing the
Harmonized 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 of
people. Time allocation data are of compositional nature in origin, that is, they are
subject to non-negativity and constant-sum constraints. Thus, standard multivariate
techniques cannot be directly applied to analyze them. The goal of this work is to
identify homogeneous Spanish Autonomous Communities with regard to the typical
activity pattern of their respective populations. To this end, fuzzy clustering approach
is followed. Rather than the hard partitioning of classical clustering, where objects are
allocated to only a single group, fuzzy method identify overlapping groups of objects
by allowing them to belong to more than one group. Concretely, the probabilistic fuzzy
c-means algorithm is conveniently adapted to deal with the Spanish Time Use Survey
microdata. As a result, a map distinguishing Autonomous Communities with similar
activity pattern is drawn.
Key words: Time use data, Fuzzy clustering; FCM; simplex space; Aitchison distance
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