The Urban Competitiveness of Southwest Cities in China Based on Factor Analysis

Factor analysis is an important way of data mining which can be performed using MATLAB, Python, and so on. We studied the urban competitiveness of Southwest cities in China using factor analysis. Two factors were extracted among 22 original variables. The factor score of cities was obtained using Python and were classified into three categories: Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming and Guiyang are the first-tier cities; Baoshan, Pu’er, Lincang and Lijiang cities are of the lowest tier; the remaining cities belong to the second tier.