量化地理分布差异,揭示人流模型跨区域迁移的瓶颈
Quantifying geographic domain shift to decouple the geospatial transferability of human mobility flow generation models

- 引入地理域偏移概念,用信息与空间偏移度量区域差异
- 发现迁移性能在不同地区差异显著且不对称,两类偏移均具解释力
- 为提升人流模型跨区域泛化能力提供评估框架,适合地理智能研究者
人类移动是理解城市系统社会、经济和环境动态的重要代理指标。地理可迁移性衡量模型在新区域或未见区域的表现,是评估不同人流生成模型的关键维度。然而,现有研究极少探讨其内在特性。本研究基于美国2265个县普查区通勤流的大规模基准数据集,系统考察四种代表性人流生成模型的地理可迁移性。受机器学习领域适应理论启发,提出“地理域偏移”概念,用于描述源区域与目标区域间地理特征分布与空间结构的内在差异,这些差异可能共同影响模型迁移效果。进一步提出互信息与空间偏移两项指标,量化地理域偏移。通过线性混合效应回归分析其与可迁移性的关联,结果表明迁移性能存在显著空间异质性和非对称性。信息偏移与空间偏移均具有统计显著性且互补解释力,说明地理可迁移性不仅取决于模型设计,也受地理固有差异影响。研究为评估与改进人流生成模型的地理可迁移性提供了新方法论框架,支持更稳健、公平的人流数据合成,并为GeoAI模型的空间迁移能力研究提供洞见。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Human mobility serves as an essential proxy for understanding social, economic, and environmental dynamics in urban systems. Geospatial transferability, which measures a model's capability in a new location or unseen region, is a critical dimension for comparing different human mobility generation models. However, few studies have studied the intrinsic characteristics of geospatial transferability. To this end, this study systematically investigates the geospatial transferability of four representative human mobility generation models using a large-scale benchmark dataset of census tract level commuting flows across 2265 counties in the United States. Inspired by the domain adaptation theory in machine learning, we introduce geographic domain shift to describe the intrinsic differences in geographic feature distributions and spatial structures between source and target regions, which may jointly affect model transferability. Moreover, we propose two metrics, mutual information and spatial shift, to quantify the geographic domain shift. To examine their associations with model transferability, we employ linear mixed-effects regression to analyze the associations between geographic domain shifts and transferability. Our results reveal substantial spatial heterogeneity and asymmetry in transfer performance across regions. Both information shift and spatial shift exhibit statistically significant and complementary explanatory power. This indicates that geospatial transferability depends not only on model design but also on intrinsic geographic differences. These findings provide a novel methodological framework for evaluating and improving the geospatial transferability of human mobility generation models and support more robust and fair human mobility data synthesis across diverse regions. It also offers insights on spatial transferability for GeoAI model development.
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