Demographics-Informed Neural Network for Multi-Modal Spatiotemporal forecasting of Urban Growth and Travel Patterns Using Satellite Imagery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a demographics-informed deep learning model that jointly forecasts urban growth and travel patterns by integrating satellite imagery, demographic data, and travel behavior, achieving superior accuracy and realism.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-modal neural network architecture with a demographics prediction component and multi-objective loss, advancing urban spatial transformation forecasting.

Findings

Achieves higher SSIM (0.8342) than baseline models.

Significantly improves demographic consistency (Demo-loss: 0.14).

Validates co-evolutionary theories of urban development.

Abstract

This study presents a novel demographics informed deep learning framework designed to forecast urban spatial transformations by jointly modeling geographic satellite imagery, socio-demographics, and travel behavior dynamics. The proposed model employs an encoder-decoder architecture with temporal gated residual connections, integrating satellite imagery and demographic data to accurately forecast future spatial transformations. The study also introduces a demographics prediction component which ensures that predicted satellite imagery are consistent with demographic features, significantly enhancing physiological realism and socioeconomic accuracy. The framework is enhanced by a proposed multi-objective loss function complemented by a semantic loss function that balances visual realism with temporal coherence. The experimental results from this study demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art models, achieving higher structural similarity (SSIM: 0.8342) and significantly improved demographic consistency (Demo-loss: 0.14 versus 0.95 and 0.96 for baseline models). Additionally, the study validates co-evolutionary theories of urban development, demonstrating quantifiable bidirectional influences between built environment characteristics and population patterns. The study also contributes a comprehensive multimodal dataset pairing satellite imagery sequences (2012-2023) with corresponding demographic and travel behavior attributes, addressing existing gaps in urban and transportation planning resources by explicitly connecting physical landscape evolution with socio-demographic patterns.