Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2009, volume 36, pages 398^416

Modeling land-use change is a prerequisite to understanding the complexity of land-use- change patterns. This paper presents a novel method to model urban land-use change using support-vector machines (SVMs), a new generation of machine learning algorithms used in classifica- tion and regression domains. An SVM modeling framework has been developed to analyze land-use change in relation to various factors such as population, distance to roads and facilities, and surrounding land use. As land-use data are generally unbalanced, in the sense that the unchanged data overwhelm the changed data, traditional methods are incapable of classifying relatively minor land-use changes with high accuracy. To circumvent this problem, an unbalanced SVM has been adopted by enhancing the standard SVMs. A case study of Calgary land-use change demonstrates that the unbalanced SVMs can achieve high and reliable performance for land-use-change modeling.