Detecting ethnic residential clusters using an optimisation clustering method

To understand residential clustering of contemporary immigrants and other ethnic minorities in urban areas, it is important to first identify where they are clustered. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the use of local statistics as a tool for finding the location of racial/ethnic residential clusters. However, since many existing local statistics are primarily developed for epidemiological studies where clustering is associated with relatively rare events, its application in studies of residential segregation may not always yield satisfactory results. This article proposes an optimisation clustering method for delineating the boundaries of ethnic residential clusters. The proposed approach uses a modified greedy algorithm to find the most likely extent of clusters and employs total within-group absolute deviations as a clustering criterion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we applied it to a set of synthetic landscapes and to two empirical data sets in Auckland, New Zealand. The results show that the proposed method can detect ethnic residential clusters effectively and that it has potential for use in other disciplines as it offers an ability to detect large, arbitrarily shaped clusters.