Study on classification of China seaports development types based on clustering analysis

As a crucial code of the world logistics system, seaport becomes increasingly important in the development of social economy and the adjustment of industrial structure. A clear understanding of the development stages of the seaport is the key to improve the seaport’s capability. By introducing an evaluation index which reflects the seaport’s development and selecting some typical representative seaports in China as the object analyzed, this paper proposes the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm on the basis of the cluster analysis principle. The comparison with the existed Hard C-Means (HCM) algorithm proves the validity and superiority of FCM. It also makes a quantitative analysis on the classification of the seaport’s development from two different angles: by horizontal analysis, studying the characteristics of different development stages; by vertical analysis, exploring the reasons for fluctuation of the cluster results in successive years and predicting the trend of the development in the future.