Learning Task-Specific City Region Partitions

The proliferation of publicly accessible urban data provide new insights on various urban tasks. A frequently used approach is to treat each region as a data sample and build a model over all the regions to observe the correlations between urban features (e.g., demographics) and the target variable (e.g., crime count). To define regions, most existing studies use fixed grids or pre-defined administrative boundaries (e.g., census tracts or community areas). In reality, however, definitions of regions should be different depending on tasks (e.g., regional crime count prediction vs. real estate prices estimation). In this paper, we propose a new problem of task-specific city region partitioning, aiming to find the best partition in a city w.r.t. a given task. We prove this is an NP-hard search problem with no trivial solution. To learn the partition, we first study two variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We further propose a reinforcement learning scheme for effective sampling the search space. We conduct experiments on two real datasets in Chicago (i.e., crime count and real estate price) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.