The spatial concentration of human activity is a crucial indication of socioeconomic vitality. Accurately mapping activity volumes is fundamental to support regional sustainable development. Current approaches rely on mobile positioning data, which record information about human daily activity but are inaccessible in most cities due to privacy and data sharing concerns. Alternative methods are needed to provide more generalized predictions on extensive areas while maintaining low cost. This study demonstrates how remote sensing imagery can be used through an end-to-end deep learning framework for reliable estimates of human activity volumes. The neighbour effect, representing the inherent nature of spatial autocorrelation in the volumes, is incorporated to improve the network. The proposed model exhibits strong predictive power and demonstrates great explainability of physical environment on variations of activity volumes. Landscape interpretations based on hierarchical features provide both object-based and region-based insights into the co-evolvement of landscape and human activity. Our findings indicate the possibility of extensively predicting activity volumes, especially in areas with limited access to mobile data, and provide support for the promising framework to better comprehend broad aspects of human society from observable physical environments.
In forestry studies, deep learning models have achieved excellent performance in many application scenarios (e.g., detecting forest damage). However, the unclear model decisions (i.e., black-box) undermine the credibility of the results and hinder their practicality. This study intends to obtain explanations of such models through the use of explainable artificial intelligence methods, and then use feature unlearning methods to improve their performance, which is the first such attempt in the field of forestry. Results of three experiments show that the model training can be guided by expertise to gain specific knowledge, which is reflected by explanations. For all three experiments based on synthetic and real leaf images, the improvement of models is quantified in the classification accuracy (up to 4.6%) and three indicators of explanation assessment (i.e., root-mean-square error, cosine similarity, and the proportion of important pixels). Besides, the introduced expertise in annotation matrix form was automatically created in all experiments. This study emphasizes that studies of deep learning in forestry should not only pursue model performance (e.g., higher classification accuracy) but also focus on the explanations and try to improve models according to the expertise.
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