Identifying Metropolitan Areas

There are endless ways in which we can group people together in space, the most common ways are of course cities, towns, villages, and metropolitan areas. Today we define cities, and metropolitan areas using a mixture of techniques such as historical boundaries and strict rules that deal with commuting and population density to determine the outlines of a metropolitan area[2]. The way in which these delineations are determined is important because they are the basis for various statistical calculations detailing anything from community diversity to median incomes. These statistics are then used to help determine economic and infrastructure initiatives, which could be beneficial to the community, but could also be wasteful if the statistics do not represent the true community. Thus a robust method of community delineation that captures the true structure of connections would allow for more representative statistics. These more representative statistics will allow policy makers to have a better understanding of the issues. With this better understanding they should then be better able to solve these problems. This robust method can be found by turning to network theory, the study of connections between entities. This field of study is useful one because metropolitan areas are supposed to represent closely connected areas. Specifically it would be useful to look at network theory in an attempt to find an algorithm that identifies the community structure by looking data of the workers who commute to and from various counties. Using these techniques we should be able to provide delineations that are judged to be both significant and proper.Bachelor of Scienc