Sensitivity analysis and accuracy assessment of the land transformation model using cellular automata

This study evaluates the effects of cellular automata (CA) with different neighborhood sizes on the predictive performance of the Land Transformation Model (LTM). Landsat images were used to extract urban footprints and the driving forces behind urban growth seen for the metropolitan areas of Tehran and Isfahan in Iran. LTM, which uses a back-propagation neural network, was applied to investigate the relationships between urban growth and the associated drivers, and to create the transition probability map. To simulate urban growth, the following two approaches were implemented: (a) the LTM using a top-down approach for cell allocation grounding on the highest values in the transition probability map and (b) a CA with varying spatial neighborhood sizes. The results show that using the LTM-CA approach increases the accuracy of the simulated land use maps when compared with the use of the LTM top-down approach. In particular, the LTM-CA with a 7 × 7 neighborhood size performed well and improved the accuracy. The level of agreement between simulated and actual urban growth increased from 58% to 61% for Tehran and from 39% to 43% for Isfahan. In conclusion, even though the LTM-CA outperforms the LTM with a top-down approach, more studies have to be carried out within other geographical settings to better evaluate the effect of CA on the allocation phase of the urban growth simulation.