Identifying urban functional zones by capturing multi-spatial distribution patterns of points of interest

Urban Functional Zone (UFZ) identification is vital for urban planning, renewal, and development. Point of Interest (POI), as one of the most popular data in UFZ studies, is transformed into a geo-corpus under specific sampling strategies, which can be used with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to extract geo-semantic features and identify UFZs. However, existing studies only capture a single spatial distribution pattern of POIs, while ignoring the other spatial distribution information. In this paper, we developed an integrated geo-corpus construction approach to capture multi-spatial distribution patterns of POIs that were represented by different modal POI embeddings. Subsequently, random forest model was leveraged to classify UFZs based on those embeddings. A set of combination experiments were designed for performance validation. The results show that our proposed method can effectively identify UFZs with an accuracy of 72.9%, with an improvement of 8.5% compared to the baseline methods. The outcome of this study will help urban planners to better understand UFZs through investigating the integrated spatial distribution patterns of POIs embedded in UFZs.