Betweenness centrality in urban networks: revealing the transportation backbone of the country from the demographic data

The theory of complex networks plays an important role in the modelling and analysis of processes in urban systems, for example, in studies of urban transport networks, the evolution of street networks, passenger flows in the city, etc. In this study we analyze a set of demographic data taken from official population census of Republic of Kazakhstan considering the complex network approach based on spatio-populational principles, namely, the estimation of the distance between cities and taking into account their populations. To determine the geopolitical importance of particular city we use very common network characteristics such as the degree of the node and the betweenness centrality. We show how the values of betweenness can reveal the main transport routes in the country and evaluate the wealth of transportation network.