A Neural Network for Modeling Multicategorical Parcel Use Change

This paper presents an artificial neural network (ANN) for modeling multicategorical land use changes. Compared to conventional statistical models and cellular automata models, ANNs have both the architecture appropriate for addressing complex problems and the power for spatio-temporal prediction. The model consists of two layers with multiple input and output units. Bayesian regularization was used for network training in order to select an optimal model that avoids over-fitting problem. When trained and applied to predict changes in parcel use in a coastal county from 1990 to 2008, the ANN model performed well as measured by high prediction accuracy (82.0-98.5%) and high Kappa coefficient (81.4-97.5%) with only slight variation across five different land use categories. ANN also outperformed the benchmark multinomial logistic regression by average 17.5 percentage points in categorical accuracy and by 9.2 percentage points in overall accuracy. The authors used the ANN model to predict future parcel use change from 2007 to 2030.