Studying Road Transportation Demand in the Spanish Industrial Sector Through k-Means Clustering

Abstract

Transportation is the economic activity that is the most tightly coupled with the other ones. As a result, knowledge about transportation in general, and market demand in particular, is key for an economic analyisis of a sector. In present paper, the official data about the industrial sector, coming from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport in Spain, is analysed. In order to do that, k-means clustering technique is applied to find groupings or patterns in the dataset that contains data from a whole year (2015). Samples allocation to clusters and silhouette values are used to characterize the demand of the industrial transportation. Useful insights into the analysed sector are obtained by means of the clustering technique, that has been applied with 4 different criteria.