readme

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* Meta-information on the code used in the Research Materials
* "Tools for analysing fuzzy clusters of sequences data"
* Published in Demographic Research (2024)
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* Authors:
* Raffaella Piccarreta, Bocconi University, raffaella.piccarreta@unibocconi.it 
* Emanuela Struffolino, University of Milan, emanuela.struffolino@unimi.it
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The data used in the publication cannot be distributed: to obtain official access, researchers can apply to the Italian Statistical Office (ISTAT, www.istat.it). 

We therefore provide the code for performing the analyses on data that are open-access.

The archive "6634_code.zip" contains all relevant materiales:

1-"Analysing-fuzzy-clusters-of-sequences-data_CodeForApplication.pdf" is a document describing how to generate the data and run all the analytical steps presented in the publication: all the relevant code is included in this document. 

2-"biofam_fuzzy.Rdata". To illustrate the procedure, we use a sample from the data frame
biofam available in the package TraMineR. The data frame "biofam_fuzzy.Rdata" contains information on 2000 16-year-long family life sequences built from the retrospective biographical survey carried out by the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) in 2002. For the sake of illustration we will focus only on the first 500 cases in the data frame. "biofam_fuzzy.Rdata" should be loaded to run the code included in "Analysing-fuzzy-clusters-of-sequences-data_CodeForApplication.pdf". In the Appendix of this latter details on the procedure followed to build the objects in "biofam_fuzzy.Rdata" can be found.

3-"Functions_Fuzzy_MC_Github.R" contains the functions to calculate the density-based and the generalised silhouette coefficients and to build the weighted index sequence plots in Figure 2 in the publication. 

All materials are also  available on the github page of one of the authors, https://github.com/raffaellapiccarreta/Tools-for-analysing-fuzzy-clusters-of-sequences-data.