• DOI:10.1080/00330124.2012.700499
• Corpus ID: 119297992

Head/Tail Breaks: A New Classification Scheme for Data with a Heavy-Tailed Distribution

@article{Jiang2012HeadTailBA,
  title={Head/Tail Breaks: A New Classification Scheme for Data with a Heavy-Tailed Distribution},
  author={Bin Jiang},
  journal={The Professional Geographer},
  year={2012},
  volume={65},
  pages={482 - 494}
}

• B. Jiang
• Published 13 September 2012
• Environmental Science
• The Professional Geographer

This article introduces a new classification scheme—head/tail breaks—to find groupings or hierarchy for data with a heavy-tailed distribution. The heavy-tailed distributions are heavily right skewed, with a minority of large values in the head and a majority of small values in the tail, commonly characterized by a power law, a lognormal, or an exponential function. For example, a country's population is often distributed in such a heavy-tailed manner, with a minority of people (e.g., 20 percent) in the countryside and the vast majority (e.g., 80 percent) in urban areas. This new classification scheme partitions all of the data values around the mean into two parts and continues the process iteratively for the values (above the mean) in the head until the head part values are no longer heavy-tailed distributed. Thus, the number of classes and the class intervals are both naturally determined. I therefore claim that the new classification scheme is more natural than the natural breaks in finding the groupings or hierarchy for data with a heavy-tailed distribution. I demonstrate the advantages of the head/tail breaks method over Jenks's natural breaks in capturing the underlying hierarchy of the data. The author would like to thank the three anonymous referees and the editor, Dr. Barney Warf, for their useful comments that led to many improvements. Any shortcomings or inadequacies remain the author's alone.