Social Sensing for Urban Land Use Identification

Abstract

The utilization of urban land use maps can reveal the patterns of human behavior through the extraction of the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of urban land use. Remote sensing that holds detailed and abundant information on spectral, textual, contextual, and spatial configurations is crucial to obtaining land use maps that reveal changes in the urban environment. However, social sensing is essential to revealing the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of urban land use. This data mining approach is related to data cleaning/outlier removal and machine learning, and is used to achieve land use classification from remote and social sensing data. In bicycle and taxi density maps, the daytime destination and nighttime origin density reflects work-related land uses, including commercial and industrial areas. By contrast, the nighttime destination and daytime origin density pattern captures the pattern of residential areas. The accuracy assessment of land use classified maps shows that the integration of remote and social sensing, using the decision tree and random forest methods, yields accuracies of 83% and 86%, respectively. Thus, this approach facilitates an accurate urban land use classification. Urban land use identification can aid policy makers in linking human activities to the socioeconomic consequences of different urban land uses.