Urbanization Process: A Simulation Method of Urban Expansion Based on RF-SNSCNN-CA Model

One of the focal points in Geographic Information Science (GIS) is to uncover the spatial distribution patterns of geographical phenomena. In response to the insufficient spatial feature learning concerning neighborhoods in traditional machine learning-based Cellular Automata (CA) models for land use change, this study couples the Random Forest (RF) model and the Spatially Non-Stationary Convolutional Neural Network (SNSCNN) model to the CA model. The resulting RF-SNSCNN-CA model considers the issue of spatial non-stationarity by incorporating attention mechanisms. Using observed urban land change data from 2010 to 2017 in the 21 districts of Chongqing’s main city as an example, two sets of experiments comprising eight scenarios were designed to verify the neighborhood effects. The results demonstrate that the proposed RF-SNSCNN-CA model achieves an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 97.82%, Kappa of 0.7683, and Figure of Merit (FoM) of 0.3836. The study reveals the following findings. Firstly, the RF-SNSCNN-CA model integrates the dual advantages of traditional machine learning and deep learning models, in which SNSCNN improves by the combined effect of channel and spatial attention mechanisms improves the learning of neighborhood features; secondly, the machine learning-like urban sprawl CA modeling process, regardless of the approach taken to obtain development suitability, cannot completely replace the learning of the neighborhood part; lastly, the use of traditional neighborhood modeling methods may produce suppression of simulation results and make the model inadequately learn spatial features.