Ideas are the most powerful things in existence. Here are mine.
Edge cities tend to spring up radially around larger population centers, leading to population distributions that tend to be proportional to the population in the host city and inversely proportional to the distance from it.
Decisions using the kNN framework are arrived at through a majority vote of an observation’s k nearest neighbors (given some distance metric). When aggregating many kNN decisions and weighing them against one much more important kNN decision, one strategy I’ve found to work well is to copy congress:
The critical neighbor is “the President” and can’t “pass” the vote, but can “veto” it.
A decision is made to “pass” either on the vote of a majority of the neighbors in the absence of a veto, or given a 2/3 majority in its presence.
One example of this is aggregating decisions over a market index. Each individual asset in the index has an impact in its overall movement, but the index itself (the President) can also be analyzed directly.
The root of this phenomenon is cultural, but in no small part it is perpetuated by the sheer number of hours that a job consumes. It crowds everything else out and both dichotomizes and quantizes the schedule: “weekday” vs. “weekend”, “work time” vs. “personal time”.
There’s little time to do anything beyond the job at that point. Choose carefully.