Assessing Different Spatial Grouping Algorithms: An Application to the Design of Australia's New Statistical Geography

<title>Abstract</title> Algorithms have been used to assist in the design of statistical geographies which define areal groupings for which official data are collected. Typically the groupings based on different parameter values or different algorithms are not formally compared, but summary statistics based on each solution can be constructed, some of which are based on fuzzy set principles. These principles can also be used to make incremental adjustments to solutions, based on different criteria. In this paper, we adopt the above methodology to compare the new statistical geography for New South Wales developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics with that generated by an amended version of the Coombes algorithm.