DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6360651
title: Multi-aspect Integrated Migration Indicators (MIMI) dataset

description: The Multi-aspect Integrated Migration Indicators (MIMI) dataset is the result of the process of gathering, embedding and combining traditional migration datasets, mostly from sources like Eurostat and UNSD Demographic Statistics Database, and alternative types of data, which consists in multidisciplinary features and measures not typically employed in migration studies, such as the Facebook Social Connectedness Index (SCI). Its purpose is to exploit these novel types of data for: nowcasting migration flows and stocks, studying integration of multiple sources and knowledge, and investigating migration drivers. The MIMI dataset is designed to have a unique pair of countries for each row. Each record contains country-to-country information about: migrations flows and stock their share, their strength of Facebook connectedness and other features, such as corresponding populations, GDP, coordinates, NET migration, and many others. <strong>Methodology. </strong> After having collected <strong>bilateral flows</strong> records about international human mobility by citizenship, residence and country of birth (available for both sexes and, in some cases, for different age groups), they have been merged together in order to obtain a unique dataset in which each ordered couple <em>(country-of-origin, country-of-destination)</em> appears once. To avoid duplicate couples, flow records have been selected by following this priority: first migration by citizenship, then migration by residence and lastly by country of birth. The integration process started by choosing, collecting and meaningfully including many other indicators that could be helpful for the dataset final purpose mentioned above. <strong>International migration stocks</strong> (having a five-year range of measurement) for each couple of countries. <strong>Geographical features</strong> for each country: ISO3166 name and official name, ISO3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, continent code and name of belonging, latitude and longitude of the centroid, list of bordering countries, country area in square kilometres. Also, the following features have been included for each pair of countries: geodesic distance (in kilometres) computed between their respective centroids. <strong>Non-bidirectional migration measures </strong>for each country: total number of immigrants and emigrants for each year, NET migration and NET migration rate in a five-year range. Other <strong>multidisciplinary indicators</strong> (cultural, social, anthropological, demographical, historical features) related to each country: religion (single one or list), yearly GDP at PPP, spoken language (or list of languages), yearly population stocks (and population densities if available), number of Facebook users, percentage of Facebook users, cultural indicators (PDI, IDV, MAS, UAI, LTO). Also the following feature have been included for each pair of countries: Facebook Social Connectedness Index. Once traditional and non-traditional knowledge is gathered and integrated, we move to the pre-processing phase where we manage the data cleaning, preparation and transformation. Here our dataset was subjected to various computational standard processes and additionally reshaped in the final structure established by our design choices. The data quality assessment phase was one of the longest and most delicate, since many values were missing and this could have had a negative impact on the quality of the desired resulting knowledge. They have been integrated from additional sources such as The World Bank, World Population Review, Statista, DataHub, Wikipedia and in some cases extracted from Python libraries such as PyPopulation, CountryInfo and PyCountry. The final dataset has the structure of a huge matrix having countries couples as index (uniquely identified by coupling their ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes): it comprises 28725 entries and 485 columns.