Identifying groups of children's social mobility opportunity for public health applications using k-means clustering

The Opportunity Atlas project is a pioneering effort to trace social mobility and adulthood socioeconomic outcomes back to childhood residence. Half of the variation in adulthood socioeconomic outcomes was explainable by neighborhood-level socioeconomic characteristics during childhood. Clustering census tracts by Opportunity Atlas characteristics would allow for further exploration of variance in social mobility. Our objectives here are to identify and describe spatial clustering trends within Opportunity Atlas outcomes.

We utilized a k-means clustering machine learning approach with four outcome variables (individual income, incarceration rate, employment, and percent of residents living in a neighborhood with low levels of poverty) each given at five parental income levels (1st, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of the national distribution) to create clusters of census tracts across the contiguous United States (US) and within each Environmental Protection Agency region.

At the national level, the algorithm identified seven distinct clusters; the highest opportunity clusters occurred in the Northern Midwest and Northeast, and the lowest opportunity clusters occurred in rural areas of the Southwest and Southeast. For regional analyses, we identified between five to nine clusters within each region. PCA loadings fluctuate across parental income levels; income and low poverty neighborhood residence explain a substantial amount of variance across all variables, but there are differences in contributions across parental income levels for many components.

Using data from the Opportunity Atlas, we have taken four social mobility opportunity outcome variables each stratified at five parental income levels and created nationwide and EPA region-specific clusters that group together census tracts with similar opportunity profiles. The development of clusters that can serve as a combined index of social mobility opportunity is an important contribution of this work, and this in turn can be employed in future investigations of factors associated with children's social mobility.