Comparison of approaches for urban functional zones classification based on multi-source geospatial data: A case study in Yuzhong District, Chongqing, China
Abstract
Accurate and timely classification and monitoring of urban functional zones prove to be significant in rapidly developing cities, to better understand the real and varying urban functions of cities to support urban planning and management. Many efforts have been undertaken to identify urban functional zones using various classification approaches and multi-source geospatial datasets. The complexity of this category of classification poses tremendous challenges to these studies especially in terms of classification accuracy, but on the opposite, the rapid development of machine learning technologies provides us with new opportunities. In this study, a set of commonly used urban functional zones classification approaches, including Multinomial Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest, are examined and compared with the newly developed eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model, using the case study of Yuzhong District, Chongqing, China. The investigation is based on multi-variate geospatial data, including night-time imagery, geotagged Weibo data, points of interest (POI) from Gaode, and Baidu Heat Map. This study is the first endeavor of implementing the XGBoost model in the field of urban functional zones classification. The results suggest that the XGBoost classification model performed the best and was able to achieve an accuracy of 88.05%, which is significantly higher than the other commonly used approaches. In addition, the integration of night-time imagery, geotagged Weibo data, POI from Gaode, and Baidu Heat Map has also demonstrated their values for the classification of urban functional zones in this case study.