Identifying telecommunication strategies and investment opportunities in Latin American countries based on clustering analysis

In this paper we present a methodology for feature selection and clustering over variables describing countries' economies and ICT indicators to study and identify investment opportunities, based on similarities between European and Latin American countries. We address two different problems. First, the work is based on a feature selection problem carried out with the Coral Reef Optimization algorithm. The CRO is a novel bio-inspired based on the simulation of reef formation and coral reproduction. On the other hand, the K-Means++ method is a high-performance robust tool designed to solve clustering problems. Together, both algorithms are able to successfully identify investment opportunities in Latin America and quantify the potential of the telecommunications industry in both regional areas. The work considers different economical and ICT's variables from different European and Latin America countries datasets (mainly Agenda 21 and other available and global sources) for the period 2002-2012.