Investigating economic activity concentration patterns of co-agglomerations through association rule mining

Economic activity tends to concentrate in particular geographic areas forming agglomerations and co-locations of firms. These agglomerations bring benefits for the firms themselves by increasing productivity, access to human resources, labor pooling, innovation, knowledge spillovers and regional growth. In this paper, we present a method for the discovery and analysis of such agglomerations. The method allows to spot patterns of co-locations in the composition of the agglomerations. Those patterns identify important relationships between the firms compounding the agglomerations thus describing the dynamics that exists inside the agglomeration itself.