Cross Sectional and Longitudinal Fuzzy Clustering of the NUTS and Positioning of the Italian Regions with Respect to the Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI) Indicators with Contiguity Constraints
In socio-economical clustering often the empirical information is represented by time-varying data generated by indicators observed over time on a set of subnational (regional) units. Usually among these units may exist contiguity relations, spatial but not only.In this paper we propose a fuzzy clustering model of multivariate time-varying data, the longitudinal fuzzy C-Medoids clustering with contiguity constraints. The temporal aspect is dealt with by using appropriate measures of dissimilarity between time trajectories.