Identification of behavior patterns in household solid waste generation in Mexicali's city: Study case

A strategy of household waste data analysis is proposed in this work, based on the WEKA workbench, developed on the Pattern Recognition community. The analysis was conducted on data collected from homes at residential areas in the city of Mexicali, México. The data included information about solid waste produced and also the householder's commitment to the environment, assessed in a Likert's scale based on a questionnaire. A cluster analysis and a tree classifier constructed using the clustered data are presented. An analysis of the decision tree allowed to translate the resulting tree in a set of production rules. After the interpretation of these rules, we were able to predict an environmental behavior, based on the information about waste generation and the questionnaire answers. The rules showed a tendency to bring together members of the same family, concurring in all cases the reference to the same period of waste generation. The elements identified on each rule indicate that the socioeconomic stratum is an important factor, related to behavioral attributes and consumption habits, the main relationship is based on attributes of waste generation as glass, organics, paper, inert, mixer containers and sanitary. The discovered relationships between the cluster, socio-demographic, behavioral and waste attributes are presented and discussed.