Comparison of twelve machine learning regression methods for spatial decomposition of demographic data using multisource geospatial data: An experiment in Guangzhou city, China

Abstract

The spatial decomposition of demographic data at a fine resolution is a classic and crucial problem in the field of geographical information science. The main objective of this study was to compare twelve well‐known machine learning regression algorithms for the spatial decomposition of demographic data with multisource geospatial data. Grid search and cross‐validation methods were used to ensure that the optimal model parameters were obtained. The results showed that all the global regression algorithms used in the study exhibited acceptable results, besides the ordinary least squares (OLS) algorithm. In addition, the regularization method and the subsetting method were both useful for alleviating overfitting in the OLS model, and the former was better than the latter. The more competitive performance of the nonlinear regression algorithms than the linear regression algorithms implies that the relationship between population density and influence factors is likely to be non‐linear. Among the global regression algorithms used in the study, the best results were achieved by the k‐nearest neighbors (KNN) regression algorithm. In addition, it was found that multi‐sources geospatial data can improve the accuracy of spatial decomposition results significantly, and thus the proposed method in our study can be applied to the study of spatial decomposition in other areas.