Neural Embeddings of Urban Big Data Reveal Emergent Structures in Cities

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12371v1
• Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2021 07:13:14 GMT
• Title: Neural Embeddings of Urban Big Data Reveal Emergent Structures in Cities
• Authors: Chao Fan, Yang Yang, Ali Mostafavi
• Abstract summary: We propose using a neural embedding model-graph neural network (GNN)- that leverages the heterogeneous features of urban areas. Using large-scale high-resolution mobility data sets from millions of aggregated and anonymized mobile phone users in 16 metropolitan counties in the United States, we demonstrate that our embeddings encode complex relationships among features related to urban components. We show that embeddings generated by a model trained on a different county can capture 50% to 60% of the emergent spatial structure in another county.
• Score: 7.148078723492643
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: In this study, we propose using a neural embedding model-graph neural network (GNN)- that leverages the heterogeneous features of urban areas and their interactions captured by human mobility network to obtain vector representations of these areas. Using large-scale high-resolution mobility data sets from millions of aggregated and anonymized mobile phone users in 16 metropolitan counties in the United States, we demonstrate that our embeddings encode complex relationships among features related to urban components (such as distribution of facilities) and population attributes and activities. The spatial gradient in each direction from city center to suburbs is measured using clustered representations and the shared characteristics among urban areas in the same cluster. Furthermore, we show that embeddings generated by a model trained on a different county can capture 50% to 60% of the emergent spatial structure in another county, allowing us to make cross-county comparisons in a quantitative way. Our GNN-based framework overcomes the limitations of previous methods used for examining spatial structures and is highly scalable. The findings reveal non-linear relationships among urban components and anisotropic spatial gradients in cities. Since the identified spatial structures and gradients capture the combined effects of various mechanisms, such as segregation, disparate facility distribution, and human mobility, the findings could help identify the limitations of the current city structure to inform planning decisions and policies. Also, the model and findings set the stage for a variety of research in urban planning, engineering and social science through integrated understanding of how the complex interactions between urban components and population activities and attributes shape the spatial structures in cities.

Related papers

• Explainable Hierarchical Urban Representation Learning for Commuting Flow Prediction [1.5156879440024378]
  Commuting flow prediction is an essential task for municipal operations in the real world. We develop a heterogeneous graph-based model to generate meaningful region embeddings for predicting different types of inter-level OD flows. Our proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of a uniform urban structure.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-27T03:30:01Z)
• Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks [82.82866901799565]
  We build a new set of multimodal remote sensing benchmark datasets (including hyperspectral, multispectral, SAR) for the study purpose of the cross-city semantic segmentation task. Beyond the single city, we propose a high-resolution domain adaptation network, HighDAN, to promote the AI model's generalization ability from the multi-city environments. HighDAN is capable of retaining the spatially topological structure of the studied urban scene well in a parallel high-to-low resolution fusion fashion.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-26T23:55:39Z)
• Unified Data Management and Comprehensive Performance Evaluation for Urban Spatial-Temporal Prediction [Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark] [78.05103666987655]
  This work addresses challenges in accessing and utilizing diverse urban spatial-temporal datasets. We introduceatomic files, a unified storage format designed for urban spatial-temporal big data, and validate its effectiveness on 40 diverse datasets. We conduct extensive experiments using diverse models and datasets, establishing a performance leaderboard and identifying promising research directions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-24T16:20:00Z)
• Adaptive Hierarchical SpatioTemporal Network for Traffic Forecasting [70.66710698485745]
  We propose an Adaptive Hierarchical SpatioTemporal Network (AHSTN) to promote traffic forecasting. AHSTN exploits the spatial hierarchy and modeling multi-scale spatial correlations. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that AHSTN achieves better performance over several strong baselines.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-15T14:50:27Z)
• Multi-Temporal Relationship Inference in Urban Areas [75.86026742632528]
  Finding temporal relationships among locations can benefit a bunch of urban applications, such as dynamic offline advertising and smart public transport planning. We propose a solution to Trial with a graph learning scheme, which includes a spatially evolving graph neural network (SEENet) SEConv performs the intra-time aggregation and inter-time propagation to capture the multifaceted spatially evolving contexts from the view of location message passing. SE-SSL designs time-aware self-supervised learning tasks in a global-local manner with additional evolving constraint to enhance the location representation learning and further handle the relationship sparsity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-15T07:48:32Z)
• A General Purpose Neural Architecture for Geospatial Systems [142.43454584836812]
  We present a roadmap towards the construction of a general-purpose neural architecture (GPNA) with a geospatial inductive bias. We envision how such a model may facilitate cooperation between members of the community.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-04T09:58:57Z)
• Effective Urban Region Representation Learning Using Heterogeneous Urban Graph Attention Network (HUGAT) [0.0]
  We propose heterogeneous urban graph attention network (HUGAT) for learning the representations of urban regions. In our experiments on NYC data, HUGAT outperformed all the state-of-the-art models.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-02-18T04:59:20Z)
• Methodological Foundation of a Numerical Taxonomy of Urban Form [62.997667081978825]
  We present a method for numerical taxonomy of urban form derived from biological systematics. We derive homogeneous urban tissue types and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification of urban form. After framing and presenting the method, we test it on two cities - Prague and Amsterdam.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-30T12:47:52Z)
• Quantifying spatial homogeneity of urban road networks via graph neural networks [12.875369866362327]
  The spatial homogeneity of an urban road network (URN) measures whether each distinct component is analogous to the whole network. We use Graph Neural Networks to model the 11,790 URN samples across 30 cities worldwide and use its predictability to define the spatial homogeneity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-01-01T19:45:04Z)
• City limits in the age of smartphones and urban scaling [0.0]
  Urban planning still lacks appropriate standards to define city boundaries across urban systems. ICT provide the potential to portray more accurate descriptions of the urban systems. We apply computational techniques over a large volume of mobile phone records to define urban boundaries.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-06T17:31:21Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.