Machine learning for buildings' characterization and power-law recovery of urban metrics

PLoS One. 2021 Jan 28;16(1):e0246096. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246096. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

In this paper we focus on a critical component of the city: its building stock, which holds much of its socio-economic activities. In our case, the lack of a comprehensive database about their features and its limitation to a surveyed subset lead us to adopt data-driven techniques to extend our knowledge to the near-city-scale. Neural networks and random forests are applied to identify the buildings' number of floors and construction periods' dependencies on a set of shape features: area, perimeter, and height along with the annual electricity consumption, relying a surveyed data in the city of Beirut. The predicted results are then compared with established scaling laws of urban forms, which constitutes a further consistency check and validation of our workflow.

MeSH terms

  • Cities
  • Electricity*
  • Machine Learning*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Urban Renewal*

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.