Spatial interaction – modification model and applications to geo-demographic analysis

•We proposed a novel modification model for geo-demographic analysis.•Some important theorems and properties of this model were studied.•We integrated the model to fuzzy clustering to form a new algorithm.•It was validated through experiments on both small and real datasets.•The clustering quality of our method is better than that of relevant ones.

In this paper, we introduce a novel model so-called Spatial Interaction – Modification Model (SIM2), serving for the classification of spatially-referenced demographic data. It is integrated with the main part of the best fuzzy clustering algorithm for geo-demographic analysis problem – IPFGWC to form the new method named as MIPFGWC. Theoretical and experimental analyses show that MIPFGWC achieves better clustering quality than IPFGWC and other available algorithms.