ConvergenceClubs

Description

ConvergenceClubs provides functions for clustering regions that form convergence clubs, according to the definition by Phillips and Sul (2009).

The main functions are:

• findClubs(): finds clubs of convergence, given a dataset with regions in rows and years in columns, returning an object of class convergence.clubs.
• mergeClubs(): takes as argument an object of class convergence.clubs and applies the clustering procedure to the convergence clubs contained in the argument, according to either Phillips and Sul (2009) or von Lyncker and Thoennessen (2017) procedure.

For class convergence.clubs, the following methods are available:

• summary() : shows the number of regions for each club of convergence and the number of divergent regions;
• print() : prints main information about the clubs and divergent units in the convergence.clubs object (unit IDs, beta coefficient, p-value, ...);
• dim() : return a vector of two elements, representing the number of clubs and the number of divergent units;
• plot() : plots transition path.

Installation

To install the package from CRAN, simply run the following code in R:

install.packages("ConvergenceClubs")

Or, if you want to install the development version from GitHub:

# if not present, install 'devtools' package
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rhobis/ConvergenceClubs")

Usage

library(ConvergenceClubs)

data("filteredGDP")

# Cluster Countries using GDP from year 1970 to year 2003
clubs <- findClubs(filteredGDP, dataCols=2:35, unit_names = 1, refCol=35,
                   time_trim = 1/3, cstar = 0, HACmethod = "FQSB")
summary(clubs)

# Merge clusters
mclubs <- mergeClubs(clubs, mergeMethod='PS', mergeDivergent=FALSE)
summary(mclubs)

mclubs <- mergeClubs(clubs, mergeMethod='vLT', mergeDivergent=FALSE)
summary(mclubs)


# Plot Transition Paths for all regions in each club and average Transition Path
# for all clubs
plot(mclubs)

# Plot Only average Transition Paths
plot(mclubs, clubs=NULL)
plot(mclubs, clubs=NULL, legend=TRUE)

More

• Please, report any bug or issue here.
• For more information, please contact the maintainer at rob.sichera@gmail.com.