Date:         Fri, 26 May 2006 10:10:51 -0500
Reply-To:     Duck-Hye Yang <dyang@CHAPINHALL.ORG>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Duck-Hye Yang <dyang@CHAPINHALL.ORG>
Subject:      grouping features based on position
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Dear SAS-L,

Juvenile court wants each judge to get equal number of abused/neglected
kids (cases) for fosterhome placement court hearing.
Each judge is currently assigned a group of cases from a designated
geographic area.  The issue is that some judges have too many cases.

The task is to delineate boundaries of 13 geographical areas with equal
number of cases (594 kids) who entered the system for the first time in
2005.
The boundaries are supposed to be based on school districts.  There are
527 school districts (polygon) and 594 kids.

The essence of solution should be 1) grouping school districts into 13
based on proximity but at the same time, 2) keeping approximately equal
number of kids within each of the 13 groups.

I have information on kids' location and centroid points of school
districts -- longitude/lattidute. Or I can arrange data in a way each
district has the number of foster-care kids.

Another twist of the task is: Because the boundaries based on 2005 data
may not be valid anymore 5 or 10 years from now, delineating boundaries
may need to be modeded on some predictors (projected number of kids
based on demographic/socioeconomic characteristics of school districts)
so that adjustment be made each year.

Hope that someone will share his/her experience with me.

Thanks,
Duckhye