Region-Building — a Comparison of Methods

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Abstract
This study deals with the use of quantitative methods to build up uniform or formal regions, the construction of farming-type regions in eastern Norway being used as an example. To achieve reasonable uniformity in the size of the basic areal units, some of the original administrative areas are first combined; the resulting areal units are then described by four orthogonal variables extracted by principal component analysis. Six different methods of aggregating the basic units to form regions are discussed, each method using the same measure of similarity (D2) between the basic units. The homogeneity of the regions produced by these methods is compared, and Ward's method (Ward 1963) shown to give the best (though not necessarily the optimal) solution.

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