artículo
Learning to cluster urban areas: two competitive approaches and an empirical validation
Fecha
2022Registro en:
EPJ Data Science. 2022 Dec 20;11(1):62
10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00374-2
Autor
Vera Villa, Camila
Lucchini Wortzman, Francesca
Bro, Naim
Mendoza Rocha, Marcelo
Löbel Díaz, Hans-Albert
Gutiérrez, Felipe
Dimter, Jan
Cuchacovic, Gabriel
Reyes, Axel
Valdivieso López, Hernán Felipe
Alvarado Monardez, Nicolás
Toro, Sergio
Institución
Resumen
Urban clustering detects geographical units that are internally homogeneous and distinct from their surroundings. It has applications in urban planning, but few studies compare the effectiveness of different methods. We study two techniques that represent two families of urban clustering algorithms: Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), which operate on spatially distributed data, and Deep Modularity Networks (DMONs), which work on attributed graphs of proximal nodes. To explore the strengths and limitations of these techniques, we studied their parametric sensitivity under different conditions, considering the spatial resolution, granularity of representation, and the number of descriptive attributes, among other relevant factors. To validate the methods, we asked residents of Santiago, Chile, to respond to a survey comparing city clustering solutions produced using the different methods. Our study shows that DMON is slightly preferred over GMM and that social features seem to be the most important ones to cluster urban areas.