Neighborhood change in the United States - a comparison of sequence analysis methods

Wei Kang, Sergio Rey, Levi Wolf, Elijah Knaap, Su Han

There is a recent surge in research focused on urban trans- formations in the United States via empirical analysis of neighborhood sequences. The alignment-based sequence analysis methods have become the dominant techniques for the neighborhood sequence analysis. However, it is un- clear to what extent these methods are robust in terms of producing consistent and converging sequence typolo- gies. This article sheds light on this issue by applying five sequence analysis methods to the same data set - 50 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) of the United States from 1970 to 2010.