No abstract

According to the highway data and some socioeconomic data of 1990, 1994, 2000, 2005 and 2009 of county units in the Pearl River Delta, this paper measured urban integrated power of different counties in different years by factor analysis, and estimated each county's potential in each year by means of expanded potential model. Based on that, the spatio-temporal association patterns and evolution of county potential were analyzed using spatio-temporal autocorrelation methods, and the validity of spatio-temporal association patterns was verified by comparing with spatial association patterns and cross-correlation function. The main results are shown as follows: (1) The global spatio-temporal association of county potential showed a positive effect during the study period. But this positive effect was not strong, and it had been slowly strengthened during 1994-2005 and decayed during 2005-2009. The local spatio-temporal association characteristics of most counties' potential kept relatively stable and focused on a positive autocorrelation, however, there were obvious transformations in some counties among four types of local spatio-temporal association (i.e., HH, LL, HL and LH).(2) The distribution difference and its change of local spatio-temporal association types of county potential were obvious. Spatio-temporal HH type units were located in the central zone and Shenzhen-Dongguan region of the eastern zone, but the central spatio-temporal HH area shrunk to the Guangzhou-Foshan core metropolitan region only after 2000; the spatio-temporal LL area in the western zone kept relatively stable with a surface-shaped continuous distribution pattern, new LL type units emerged in the south-central zone since 2005, the eastern LL area expanded during 1994-2000, but then gradually shrunk and scattered at the eastern edge in 2009; the spatio-temporal HL and LH areas varied significantly. (3) The local spatio-temporal association patterns of county potential among the three zones presented significant disparity, and obvious difference between the eastern and central zones tended to decrease, whereas that between the western zone and the central and eastern zones further expanded.(4) Spatio-temporal autocorrelation methods can efficiently mine the spatio-temporal association patterns of county potential, and can better reveal the complicated spatio-temporal interaction between counties than ESDA methods.

Against the background of China’s advocating ecological civilisation construction, an urgent task and a major challenge are to identify key places for ecological protection and restoration and then propose optimisation strategies for future land use, especially in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), one of the regions in China that has the highest urbanisation level. In this study, we find the key places by constructing ecological security patterns and proposing optimisation strategies for future land use by analysing land-use status. We also propose a source identification method based on the resistance distance principle. Results show that forty-six sources were mainly distributed in the mountainous areas surrounding PRD but were less distributed along both sides of the Pearl River estuary. The difference in the spatial distribution of sources is remarkable. Eighty-four corridors generally had spider-like shapes. In the central plain of PRD, corridors were relatively long and narrow. Ninety pinch points were concentrated on existing rivers. Three barriers were located in the corridors between adjacent sources. Two artificial corridors were proposed to be established, which can improve the ecological network connectivity. The method for extracting sources based on the resistance distance principle is proven to be advantageous for improving the integrity of source extraction results and making ecological security patterns more reasonable.

According as general houses' prices data, this paper, based on spatial analysis function of Geographic information system(GIS), using semi-variogram of spatial statistics, studies spatial heterogeneity of general houses' prices distribution in Dongguan quantitatively. The results from the analysis indicate: general houses' prices have both spatial autocorrelation and sometime local spatial heterogeneity, it can be found that the spatial distribution of general houses' prices takes on a zonal anisotropy by anisotropic variability analysis, which means that there are different structural characteristics in different directions for general houses' prices distribution; isotropic variability analysis reveals that: the semi-variogram of general houses' prices distribution in Dongguan is best described by spherical model, changes of general houses' prices distribution are affected by both structural and random factors; the ratio of random variance (nugget) to total variance(sill) is 37.5%, therefore the spatial correlation of general houses' prices is a kind of medium correlation with Nugget/ Sill being between 25%～75%, its spatial correlation range is 16.62 kilometres; the ratio of structure variance(partial sill) to total variance is higher than the ratio of random variance to total variance, this means that certain factors' contributions to the spatial variability of houses' prices is more than random factors' contributions.

Due to the rapid dynamics and a mass of uncertainties in the quantitative markets, the issue of how to take appropriate actions to make profits in stock trading remains a challenging one. Reinforcement learning (RL), as a reward-oriented approach for optimal control, has emerged as a promising method to tackle this strategic decision-making problem in such a complex financial scenario. In this paper, we integrated two prior financial trading strategies named constant proportion portfolio insurance (CPPI) and time-invariant portfolio protection (TIPP) into multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) and proposed two specifically designed multi-agent RL (MARL) methods: CPPI-MADDPG and TIPP-MADDPG for investigating strategic trading in quantitative markets. Afterward, we selected 100 different shares in the real financial market to test these specifically proposed approaches. The experiment results show that CPPI-MADDPG and TIPP-MADDPG approaches generally outperform the conventional ones.