New NERDS paper: Urban segregation and random walks

We have a new NERDS paper out by our Postdoc Sandro Sousa. This paper marks his main work from his PhD at Queen Mary University of London, published now:

  1. Quantifying ethnic segregation in cities through random walks by S. Sousa and V. Nicosia, published in Nature Communications

    We propose here a family of non-parametric measures for spatial distributions, based on the statistics of the trajectories of random walks on graphs associated to a spatial system. These quantities provide a consistent estimation of segregation in synthetic spatial patterns, and we use them to analyse the ethnic segregation of metropolitan areas in the US and the UK. We show that the spatial diversity of ethnic distributions, as measured through diffusion on graphs, allow us to compare the ethnic segregation of urban areas having different size, shape, or peculiar microscopic characteristics, and exhibits a strong association with socio-economic deprivation.