Abstract
This paper presents a novel method to model urban land use conversion using support vector machines (SVMs), a new generation of machine learning algorithms used in the classification and regression domains. This method derives the relationship between rural-urban land use change and various factors, such as population, distance to road and facilities, and surrounding land use. Our study showed that SVMs are an effective approach to estimating the land use conversion model, owing to their ability to model non-linear relationships, good generalization performance, and achievement of a global and unique optimum. The rural-urban land use conversions of New Castle County, Delaware between 1984–1992, 1992–1997, and 1997–2002 were used as a case study to demonstrate the applicability of SVMs to urban expansion modeling. The performance of SVMs was also compared with a commonly used binomial logistic regression (BLR) model, and the results, in terms of the overall modeling accuracy and McNamara’s test, consistently corroborated the better performance of SVMs.
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Acknowledgements
This research is funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) under CERG project no. CUHK 444107, and their support is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Huang, B., Xie, C. & Tay, R. Support vector machines for urban growth modeling. Geoinformatica 14, 83–99 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-009-0077-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-009-0077-4