Papers › Quantifying ethnic segregation in cities through random walks
Quantifying ethnic segregation in cities through random walks
Sandro Sousa, Vincenzo Nicosia
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Socioeconomic segregation is considered one of the main factors behind the emergence of large-scale inequalities in urban areas, and its characterisation is an active area of research in urban studies. There are currently many available measures of spatial segregation, but almost all of them either depend in non-trivial ways on the scale and size of the system under study, or mostly neglect the importance of large-scale spatial correlations, or depend on parameters which make it hard to compare different systems on equal grounds. We propose here two non-parametric measures of spatial variance and local spatial diversity, based on the statistical properties of the trajectories of random walks on graphs. We show that these two quantities provide a consistent and intuitive estimation of segregation of synthetic spatial patterns, and we use them to analyse and compare the ethnic segregation of large metropolitan areas in the US and the UK. The results confirm that the spatial variance and local diversity as measured through simple diffusion on graphs provides meaningful insights about the spatial organisation of ethnicities across a city, and allows us to efficiently compare the ethnic segregation of urban areas across the world irrespective of their size, shape, or peculiar microscopic characteristics.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections