Measuring Polycentricity: A Whole Graph Embedding Perspective

Polycentricity is a critical characteristic of the spatial organization of cities. Many indices have been proposed to measure the degree of morphological polycentricity or functional polycentricity. However, selecting a proper set of polycentricity indices for cities in a particular region or country still needs prior expert knowledge. This study demonstrates that whole graph embedding, as a novel and efficient computational tool, can model the city polycentricity in an integrated manner without much prior knowledge. The new method can further support visual analytics and classification very well.