Mapping Population Distribution Based on XGBoost Using Multisource Data

Mapping fine-scale distribution of the population is essential to the study of human activities, where more reliable open-access big data could be excavated with the help of machine learning models. However, the combination of multisource datasets and multidimensional features for population estimation was still unclear, and different models also needed comparison. Thus, in this study, related features from multisource data were first extracted, including building data, geographic big data, remote sensing data, and basic geographic data. Then, the effective indicators with higher contribution weight were selected from multisource data, which can reduce the noise and unstable model fitting. Finally, the population distribution map for 100-m grid was obtained in Shenzhen in 2019, and estimation results for five tree-based ensemble learning models were also compared at community scale, including random forest (RF), gradient boosted decision tree (GBDT), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), and categorical boosting (CatBoost). Our results showed that: 1) building data and geographic big data could better reflect the spatial heterogeneity of the population; 2) indicators selection could effectively improve the estimation accuracy of the population mapping; and 3) compared with other models, XGBoost had the largest R2 (80%), the smallest RMSE, and MAE, the most percentage of accurate estimation communities (−0.3