Discretize countries into regions

Hello --

I'd like to simplify my data by organizing countries into certain geographical regions. For example, if

countryName == ['Botswana','Eswatini','Lesotho','Namibia','South Africa'] 
regionName == ('Southern Africa')

and so on. I'd also like to determine the average of these new 'regions' so I can graph them.

Number of countries per new region can vary.

Sample data:

'Algeria' 2001 5.70000000000000 161 24 15 61 39 24 98 'f' 35.4200000000000

'Angola' 2005 0.700000000000000 37 45 34 21 17 13 8 'f' 18.9900000000000

'Benin' 2001 0.130000000000000 14 32 23 45 5 3 6 'f' 9.21000000000000

'Botswana' 2000 0.190000000000000 96 41 18 41 39 17 39 'f' 1.98000000000000

'Burkina Faso' 2001 0.720000000000000 44 39 2 59 17 1 26 'f' 16.2900000000000

'Burundi' 2000 0.290000000000000 34 17 6 77 6 2 26 'f' 8.52000000000000

'Cameroon' 2000 0.970000000000000 49 17 7 76 8 3 37 'f' 19.9600000000000

'Cape Verde' 2000 0.0200000000000000 39 7 2 91 3 1 36 'f' 0.510000000000000

'Central African Republic' 2005 0.0700000000000000 16 83 17 1 13 3 0 'f' 4.51000000000000

... etc.

Answer 1

[Hiro Yoshino]

One thought would be .... clustering algorithms.

How about using geographical data (longitude and latitude) as an input vector and group them up based on the distance.

https://jp.mathworks.com/help/stats/cluster-analysis.html?s_tid=CRUX_lftnav

Answer 2

[Sagar]

First download the shapefile of all countries from here:

https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri::world-countries-generalized/about

Then read the shapefile using 'shaperead' and you will see the latitude/longitude range for each countries as well as many other fields. Use those data fields to get what you want.