Entropy (Mar 2020)

Entropy as a Measure of Attractiveness and Socioeconomic Complexity in Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area

  • Maxime Lenormand,
  • Horacio Samaniego,
  • Júlio César Chaves,
  • Vinícius da Fonseca Vieira,
  • Moacyr Alvim Horta Barbosa da Silva,
  • Alexandre Gonçalves Evsukoff

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/e22030368
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 22, no. 3
p. 368

Abstract

Read online

Defining and measuring spatial inequalities across the urban environment remains a complex and elusive task which has been facilitated by the increasing availability of large geolocated databases. In this study, we rely on a mobile phone dataset and an entropy-based metric to measure the attractiveness of a location in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area (Brazil) as the diversity of visitors’ location of residence. The results show that the attractiveness of a given location measured by entropy is an important descriptor of the socioeconomic status of the location, and can thus be used as a proxy for complex socioeconomic indicators.

Keywords