A study on the driving forces of urban expansion using rough sets

Abstract

Urban expansion is the direct manifestation of urbanization and greatly affects economic growth and the decision making process for urban development policies. Therefore, extracting and analyzing the driving forces of urban expansion is an essential issue, especially for future land use planning and urban construction. This paper utilizes rough sets to analyze the driving forces of urban expansion in Guangdong Province, China. To test the validity of the driving force rules, the study area is split into two groups: the training set and the validation set. The driving force rules for urban expansion are extracted in the training set and then used to predict the urban expansion in the validation set. The overall prediction accuracy is 75.5%. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.