Link graph analysis for business site selection

This study proposes a graph-based method to address the business site selection problem from a perspective of "intraspecific competition," which takes into account the fact that most business firms are not isolated but rather are connected and can be clustered as geographical agglomerations. The proposed method treats complex interconnections among business establishments as a graph, in which each link reflects the geographical distributions and quality of establishments. After constructing the graph of the dynamic economic environment, this study applies an automatic learning algorithm to derive the optimal locale for a new business establishment. Evaluations using both synthetic and real-world data illustrate the underlying principle and effectiveness of this proposed graph-based site selection method. © 2012 IEEE.