Proposal for measuring the level of urbanicity of Brazilian cities based on the 2010 demographic census data

The scope of this study is to present a proposal for measuring the level of urbanicity in Brazilian cities based on data from the 2010 census. It is an ecological study, which used the official (urban rural) classification of IBGE (In-stituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, in portuguese) and that of small, medium and large cities of Veiga (2002). A classification tree was used for prediction with Cross Validation. Two models of analysis were tested. In model 1, the in-dependent variables were the physical and social characteristics of the cities, and the outcome was classification in accordance with IBGE criteria. In model 2, in addition to the variables used in model 1, the Veiga (2002) criterion was included as a covariate. Sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were then calculated. Model 2 showed statistically significant gains in the prediction of the level of urbanicity, increasing the sensitivity and accuracy estimates in the sets used for testing. Large cities were automatically classified as urban in model 2. However, to predict the urbanicity of other cities, Veiga (2002) criteria were combined with other physical and social characteristics of cities. The combination of indicators in model 2 enabled the definition of quantitative criteria to create typol-ogies for classifying the urban rural definition in the Brazilian municipal territory.