LVRF: A Latent Variable Based Approach for Exploring Geographic Datasets

Geographic datasets are usually accompanied by spatial non-stationarity – a phenomenon that the relationship between features varies across space. Naturally, nonstationarity can be interpreted as the underlying rule that decides how data are generated and alters over space. Therefore, traditional machine learning algorithms are not suitable for handling non-stationary geographic datasets, as they only render a single global model. To solve this problem, researchers often adopt the multiple-local-model approach, which uses different models to account for different sub-regions of space. This approach has been proven efficient but not optimal, as it is inherently difficult to decide the size of subregions. Additionally, the fact that local models are only trained on a subset of data also limits their potential. This paper proposes an entirely different strategy that interprets nonstationarity as a lack of data and addresses it by introducing latent variables to the original dataset. Backpropagation is then used to find the best values for these latent variables. Experiments show that this method is at least as efficient as multiple-local-model-based approaches and has even greater potential.