Urban Boundary Delineation from Commuting Data with Bayesian Stochastic Blockmodeling: Scale, Contiguity, and Hierarchy

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Autori principali: Morel-Balbi, Sebastian, Kirkley, Alec
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Morel-Balbi, Sebastian
Kirkley, Alec
author_facet Morel-Balbi, Sebastian
Kirkley, Alec
contents A common method for delineating urban and suburban boundaries is to identify clusters of spatial units that are highly interconnected in a network of commuting flows, each cluster signaling a cohesive economic submarket. It is critical that the clustering methods employed for this task are principled and free of unnecessary tunable parameters to avoid unwanted inductive biases while remaining scalable for high resolution mobility networks. Here we systematically assess the benefits and limitations of a wide array of Stochastic Block Models (SBMs)$\unicode{x2014}$a family of principled, nonparametric models for identifying clusters in networks$\unicode{x2014}$for delineating urban spatial boundaries with commuting data. We find that the data compression capability and relative performance of different SBM variants heavily depends on the spatial extent of the commuting network, its aggregation scale, and the method used for weighting network edges. We also construct a new measure to assess the degree to which community detection algorithms find spatially contiguous partitions, finding that traditional SBMs may produce substantial spatial discontiguities that make them challenging to use in general for urban boundary delineation. We propose a fast nonparametric regionalization algorithm that can alleviate this issue, achieving data compression close to that of unconstrained SBM models while ensuring spatial contiguity, benefiting from a deterministic optimization procedure, and being generalizable to a wide range of community detection objective functions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_04911
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Urban Boundary Delineation from Commuting Data with Bayesian Stochastic Blockmodeling: Scale, Contiguity, and Hierarchy
Morel-Balbi, Sebastian
Kirkley, Alec
Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
A common method for delineating urban and suburban boundaries is to identify clusters of spatial units that are highly interconnected in a network of commuting flows, each cluster signaling a cohesive economic submarket. It is critical that the clustering methods employed for this task are principled and free of unnecessary tunable parameters to avoid unwanted inductive biases while remaining scalable for high resolution mobility networks. Here we systematically assess the benefits and limitations of a wide array of Stochastic Block Models (SBMs)$\unicode{x2014}$a family of principled, nonparametric models for identifying clusters in networks$\unicode{x2014}$for delineating urban spatial boundaries with commuting data. We find that the data compression capability and relative performance of different SBM variants heavily depends on the spatial extent of the commuting network, its aggregation scale, and the method used for weighting network edges. We also construct a new measure to assess the degree to which community detection algorithms find spatially contiguous partitions, finding that traditional SBMs may produce substantial spatial discontiguities that make them challenging to use in general for urban boundary delineation. We propose a fast nonparametric regionalization algorithm that can alleviate this issue, achieving data compression close to that of unconstrained SBM models while ensuring spatial contiguity, benefiting from a deterministic optimization procedure, and being generalizable to a wide range of community detection objective functions.
title Urban Boundary Delineation from Commuting Data with Bayesian Stochastic Blockmodeling: Scale, Contiguity, and Hierarchy
topic Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04911