Chenghu Zhou

A new insight into land use classification based on aggregated mobile phone data

Land-use classification is essential for urban planning. Urban land-use types can be differentiated either by their physical characteristics (such as reflectivity and texture) or social functions. Remote sensing techniques have been recognized as a vital method for urban land-use classification because of their ability to capture the physical characteristics of land use. Although significant progress has been achieved in remote sensing methods designed for urban land-use classification, most techniques focus on physical characteristics, whereas knowledge of social functions is not adequately used. Owing to the wide usage of mobile phones, the activities of residents, which can be retrieved from the mobile phone data, can be determined in order to indicate the social function of land use. This could bring about the opportunity to derive land-use information from mobile phone data. To verify the application of this new data source to urban land-use classification, we first construct a vector of aggregated mobile phone data to characterize land-use types. This vector is composed of two aspects: the normalized hourly call volume and the total call volume. A semi-supervised fuzzy c-means clustering approach is then applied to infer the land-use types. The method is validated using mobile phone data collected in Singapore. Land use is determined with a detection rate of 58.03%. An analysis of the land-use classification results shows that the detection rate decreases as the heterogeneity of land use increases, and increases as the density of cell phone towers increases.

An adaptive approach to selecting a flow-partition exponent for a multiple-flow-direction algorithm

Most multiple‐flow‐direction algorithms (MFDs) use a flow‐partition coefficient (exponent) to determine the fractions draining to all downslope neighbours. The commonly used MFD often employs a fixed exponent over an entire watershed. The fixed coefficient strategy cannot effectively model the impact of local terrain conditions on the dispersion of local flow. This paper addresses this problem based on the idea that dispersion of local flow varies over space due to the spatial variation of local terrain conditions. Thus, the flow‐partition exponent of an MFD should also vary over space. We present an adaptive approach for determining the flow‐partition exponent based on local topographic attribute which controls local flow partitioning. In our approach, the influence of local terrain on flow partition is modelled by a flow‐partition function which is based on local maximum downslope gradient (we refer to this approach as MFD based on maximum downslope gradient, MFD‐md for short). With this new approach, a steep terrain which induces a convergent flow condition can be modelled using a large value for the flow‐partition exponent. Similarly, a gentle terrain can be modelled using a small value for the flow‐partition exponent. MFD‐md is quantitatively evaluated using four types of mathematical surfaces and their theoretical ‘true’ value of Specific Catchment Area (SCA). The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) shows that the error of SCA computed by MFD‐md is lower than that of SCA computed by the widely used SFD and MFD algorithms. Application of the new approach using a real DEM of a watershed in Northeast China shows that the flow accumulation computed by MFD‐md is better adapted to terrain conditions based on visual judgement.

DECODE: a new method for discovering clusters of different densities in spatial data

When clusters with different densities and noise lie in a spatial point set, the major obstacle to classifying these data is the determination of the thresholds for classification, which may form a series of bins for allocating each point to different clusters. Much of the previous work has adopted a model-based approach, but is either incapable of estimating the thresholds in an automatic way, or limited to only two point processes, i.e. noise and clusters with the same density. In this paper, we present a new density-based cluster method (DECODE), in which a spatial data set is presumed to consist of different point processes and clusters with different densities belong to different point processes. DECODE is based upon a reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) strategy and divided into three steps. The first step is to map each point in the data to its mth nearest distance, which is referred to as the distance between a point and its mth nearest neighbor. In the second step, classification thresholds are determined via a reversible jump MCMC strategy. In the third step, clusters are formed by spatially connecting the points whose mth nearest distances fall into a particular bin defined by the thresholds. Four experiments, including two simulated data sets and two seismic data sets, are used to evaluate the algorithm. Results on simulated data show that our approach is capable of discovering the clusters automatically. Results on seismic data suggest that the clustered earthquakes, identified by DECODE, either imply the epicenters of forthcoming strong earthquakes or indicate the areas with the most intensive seismicity, this is consistent with the tectonic states and estimated stress distribution in the associated areas. The comparison between DECODE and other state-of-the-art methods, such as DBSCAN, OPTICS and Wavelet Cluster, illustrates the contribution of our approach: although DECODE can be computationally expensive, it is capable of identifying the number of point processes and simultaneously estimating the classification thresholds with little prior knowledge.

Responses of Suomi-NPP VIIRS-derived nighttime lights to socioeconomic activity in China’s cities

Remotely sensed measurements of anthropogenic nocturnal lighting have been extensively used for studying human settlements and socioeconomic dynamics. Considerable efforts have been devoted to build the connections between nightlight signals and demographic and economic variables at local to global scales in order to obtain observationally based estimates for human activity. Recently, the first cloud-free composite of global nighttime light data derived from the Suomi National Polar orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor yields an increasingly clearer view of the earth surface on nights. The responses to socioeconomic activity and the potential utility of VIIRS nighttime light data, however, still remain less well understood. In this study, we examined the quantitative relationships between VIIRS nightlight-derived indices and socioeconomic variables at fine and local scales. Our results suggest that the total night radiance has significant positive associations with two airport performance indicators – passenger traffic and aircraft movement. In addition, there is a strong correlation with four urbanization variables – human population, gross domestic product, electric power consumption and paved road area. Our findings suggest that VIIRS nightlight data could be more indicative of socioeconomic dynamics and may provide insights into the potential applications for studying human settlement and urbanization processes based on anthropogenic nocturnal lighting.

Purposive Sampling for Digital Soil Mapping for Areas with Limited Data

Digital soil mapping requires two basic pieces of information: spatial information on the environmental conditions which co-vary with the soil conditions and the information on relationship between the set of environment covariates and soil conditions. The former falls into the category of GIS/remote sensing analysis. The latter is often obtained through extensive field sampling. Extensive field sampling is very labor intensive and costly. It is particularly problematic for areas with limited data. This chapter explores a purposive sampling approach to improve the efficiency of field sampling for digital soil mapping. We believe that unique soil conditions (soil types or soil properties) can be associated with unique combination (configuration) of environmental conditions. We used the fuzzy c-means classification to identify these unique combinations and their spatial locations. Field sampling efforts were then allocated to investigate the soil at the typical locations of these combinations for establishing the relationships between soil conditions and environmental conditions. The established relationships were then used to map the spatial distribution of soil conditions. A case study in China using this approach showed that this approach was effective for digital soil mapping with limited data.

A new approach to the nearest‐neighbour method to discover cluster features in overlaid spatial point processes

When two spatial point processes are overlaid, the one with the higher rate is shown as clustered points, and the other one with the lower rate is often perceived to be background. Usually, we consider the clustered points as feature and the background as noise. Revealing these point clusters allows us to further examine and understand the spatial point process. Two important aspects in discerning spatial cluster features from a set of points are the removal of noise and the determination of the number of spatial clusters. Until now, few methods were able to deal with these two aspects at the same time in an automated way. In this study, we combine the nearest‐neighbour (NN) method and the concept of density‐connected to address these two aspects. First, the removal of noise can be achieved using the NN method; then, the number of clusters can be determined by finding the density‐connected clusters. The complexity for finding density‐connected clusters is reduced in our algorithm. Since the number of clusters depends on the value of k (the kth nearest neighbour), we introduce the concept of lifetime for the number of clusters in order to measure how stable the segmentation results (or number of clusters) are. The number of clusters with the longest lifetime is considered to be the final number of clusters. Finally, a seismic example of the west part of China is used as a case study to examine the validity of our method. In this seismic case study, we discovered three seismic clusters: one as the foreshocks of the Songpan quake (M = 7.2), and the other two as aftershocks related to the Kangding‐Jiulong (M = 6.2) quake and Daguan quake (M = 7.1), respectively. Through this case study, we conclude that the approach we proposed is effective in removing noise and determining the number of feature clusters.

A strategy for raster-based geocomputation under different parallel computing platforms

The demand for parallel geocomputation based on raster data is constantly increasing with the increase of the volume of raster data for applications and the complexity of geocomputation processing. The difficulty of parallel programming and the poor portability of parallel programs between different parallel computing platforms greatly limit the development and application of parallel raster-based geocomputation algorithms. A strategy that hides the parallel details from the developer of raster-based geocomputation algorithms provides a promising way towards solving this problem. However, existing parallel raster-based libraries cannot solve the problem of the poor portability of parallel programs. This paper presents such a strategy to overcome the poor portability, along with a set of parallel raster-based geocomputation operators (PaRGO) designed and implemented under this strategy. The developed operators are compatible with three popular types of parallel computing platforms: graphics processing unit supported by compute unified device architecture, Beowulf cluster supported by message passing interface (MPI), and symmetrical multiprocessing cluster supported by MPI and open multiprocessing, which make the details of the parallel programming and the parallel hardware architecture transparent to users. By using PaRGO in a style similar to sequential program coding, geocomputation developers can quickly develop parallel raster-based geocomputation algorithms compatible with three popular parallel computing platforms. Practical applications in implementing two algorithms for digital terrain analysis show the effectiveness of PaRGO.

Comparative Estimation of Urban Development in China’s Cities Using Socioeconomic and DMSP/OLS Night Light Data

China has been undergoing a remarkably rapid urbanization process in the last several decades. Urbanization is a complicated phenomenon involving imbalanced transformation processes, such as population migrations, economic advancements and human activity dynamics. It is important to evaluate the imbalances between transformation processes to support policy making in the realms of environmental management and urban planning. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime lights time series imagery provides a consistent and timely measure to estimate socioeconomic dynamics and changes in human activity. In this study, we jointly compared the annual ranks of three variables: the population, the gross domestic product (GDP) and the sum of weighted DMSP/OLS nighttime lights to estimate spatial and temporal imbalances in the urbanization processes of 226 cities in China between 1994 and 2011. We used ternary plots and a Euclidean distance-based method to quantitatively estimate the spatial and temporal imbalances between cities and to classify diverse urban development patterns in China. Our results suggest that, from 1994 to 2011, the imbalances of urbanization processes observed in the eastern, western and middle cities decreased, respectively, by 35.26%, 29.04% and 25.84%; however, imbalances in the northeast increased by 33.29%. The average decrement in imbalances across all urbanization processes in the 226 cities was 17.58%. Cities in the eastern region displayed relatively strong attractions to population, more rapid economic development processes and lower imbalances between socioeconomic and anthropogenic dynamics than cities in other regions. Several types of urban development patterns can be identified by comparing the morphological characteristics of temporal ternary plots of the 226 cities in China. More than one third (35.40%) of the 226 cities presented balanced states during the period studied; however, the remainder showed alternative urban development patterns.

Characterizing Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Urbanization in China Using Time Series of DMSP/OLS Night Light Data

Stable nighttime light (NTL) data, derived from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS), are typically considered a proxy measure of the dynamics of human settlements and have been extensively used to quantitative estimates of demographic variables, economic activity, and land-use change in previous studies at both regional and global scales. The utility of DMSP data for characterizing spatio-temporal trends in urban development at a local scale, however, has received less attention. In this study, we utilize a time series of DMSP data to examine the spatio-temporal characteristics of urban development in 285 Chinese cities from 1992 to 2009, at both the local and national levels. We compare linear models and piecewise linear models to identify the turning points of nighttime lights and calculate the trends in nighttime light growth at the pixel level. An unsupervised classification is applied to identify the patterns in the nighttime light time series quantitatively. Our results indicate that nighttime light brightness in most areas of China exhibit a positive, multi-stage process over the last two decades; however, the average trends in nighttime light growth differ significantly. Through the piecewise linear model, we identify the saturation of nighttime light brightness in the urban center and significant increases in suburban areas. The maps of turning points indicate the greater the distance to the city center or sub-center, the later the turning point occurs. Six patterns derived from the classification illustrate the various characteristics of the nighttime light time series from the local to the national level. The results portray spatially explicit patterns and conspicuous temporal trends of urbanization dynamics for individual Chinese cities from 1992 to 2009.

Windowed nearest neighbour method for mining spatio-temporal clusters in the presence of noise

In a spatio-temporal data set, identifying spatio-temporal clusters is difficult because of the coupling of time and space and the interference of noise. Previous methods employ either the window scanning technique or the spatio-temporal distance technique to identify spatio-temporal clusters. Although easily implemented, they suffer from the subjectivity in the choice of parameters for classification. In this article, we use the windowed kth nearest (WKN) distance (the geographic distance between an event and its kth geographical nearest neighbour among those events from which to the event the temporal distances are no larger than the half of a specified time window width [TWW]) to differentiate clusters from noise in spatio-temporal data. The windowed nearest neighbour (WNN) method is composed of four steps. The first is to construct a sequence of TWW factors, with which the WKN distances of events can be computed at different temporal scales. Second, the appropriate values of TWW (i.e. the appropriate temporal scales, at which the number of false positives may reach the lowest value when classifying the events) are indicated by the local maximum values of densities of identified clustered events, which are calculated over varying TWW by using the expectation-maximization algorithm. Third, the thresholds of the WKN distance for classification are then derived with the determined TWW. In the fourth step, clustered events identified at the determined TWW are connected into clusters according to their density connectivity in geographic–temporal space. Results of simulated data and a seismic case study showed that the WNN method is efficient in identifying spatio-temporal clusters. The novelty of WNN is that it can not only identify spatio-temporal clusters with arbitrary shapes and different spatio-temporal densities but also significantly reduce the subjectivity in the classification process.