Designing the Municipality Typology for Planning Purposes: The Use of Reverse Clustering and Evolutionary Algorithms

The paper presents the preliminary results of a study, meant to determine the typology of the Polish municipalities (roughly 2500 in number), oriented at planning and programming purposes. An initial typology of this kind was elaborated by the geographers, based on a number of individual features, as well as location-related characteristics. This typology is “re-established” or “approximated” via the “reverse clustering” approach, elaborated by the authors, consisting in finding the parameters of the clustering procedure that yield the results the closest to the initial typology, for the set of municipalities, described by the definite set of variables. Altogether, one obtains the clusters (types, classes) of municipalities that are possibly similar to the original ones, but conform to the general clustering paradigm. The search for the clustering that is the most similar to the initial typology is performed with an evolutionary algorithm. The paper describes the concrete problem, the approach applied, its interpretations and conclusions, related to the results obtained.