A maps-to-maps approach for simulating urban land expansion based on convolutional long short-term memory neural networks

Cellular automata (CA) have been prevalently used for the simulation of urban land change. However, how to effectively learn the spatial-temporal dynamics of urban development from time-series data remain an important challenge for CA-based models. To address this issue, we propose a new model for the simulation of urban development based on convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) neural networks. The core of the proposed model is a sequence of vanilla ConvLSTM cells integrated with the modules of channel attention and contextual embedding. Compared with conventional CA-based models, the proposed ConvLSTM model is more advanced in that it can better leverage the open access annual urban land maps to capture simultaneously the spatial structure and the temporal dependency of historical urban development, and further predict multiple maps of annual development for subsequent years (i.e., Maps-to-Maps). The performance of the ConvLSTM model is evaluated through the case studies in China’s three mega-urban regions, and ConvLSTM outperforms other state-of-the-art deep learning architectures at both the pixel level and the coarser grid level. The results also suggest the satisfactory transferability of ConvLSTM in that the model trained in one mega-urban region can be successfully re-used in others without fine tuning.