Head/tail Breaks for Visualization of City Structure and Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces head/tail breaks, a recursive classification method, as an effective visualization tool for revealing the fractal and scaling structure of natural cities using diverse data sources.

Contribution

It proposes and demonstrates the application of head/tail breaks for visualizing city structure and dynamics, linking it to fractals and big data analysis.

Findings

Head/tail breaks effectively reveal city hierarchies.

The method applies to various data sources like social media and nighttime images.

It enhances understanding of natural city structures.

Abstract

The things surrounding us vary dramatically, which implies that there are far more small things than large ones, e.g., far more small cities than large ones in the world. This dramatic variation is often referred to as fractal or scaling. To better reveal the fractal or scaling structure, a new classification scheme, namely head/tail breaks, has been developed to recursively derive different classes or hierarchical levels. The head/tail breaks works as such: divide things into a few large ones in the head (those above the average) and many small ones (those below the average) in the tail, and recursively continue the dividing process for the large ones (or the head) until the notion of far more small things than large ones has been violated. This paper attempts to argue that head/tail breaks can be a powerful visualization tool for illustrating structure and dynamics of natural cities. Natural cities refer to naturally or objectively defined human settlements based on a meaningful cutoff averaged from a massive amount of units extracted from geographic information. To illustrate the effectiveness of head/tail breaks in visualization, I have developed several case studies applied to natural cities derived from the points of interest, social media location data, and time series nighttime images. I further elaborate on head/tail breaks related to fractals, beauty, and big data. Keywords: Big data, social media, nighttime images, natural cities, fractals, head/tail breaks, ht-index