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

Entropy (Basel). 2020 Mar 23;22(3):368. doi: 10.3390/e22030368.

Abstract

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: attractiveness; mobile phone data; urban computing; urban entropy; urban mobility.