A review of assessment methods for cellular automata models of land-use change and urban growth

Cellular automata (CA) models are in growing use for land-use change simulation and future scenario prediction. It is necessary to conduct model assessment that reports the quality of simulation results and how well the models reproduce reliable spatial patterns. Here, we review 347 CA articles published during 1999–2018 identified by a Scholar Google search using ‘cellular automata’, ‘land’ and ‘urban’ as keywords. Our review demonstrates that, during the past two decades, 89% of the publications include model assessment related to dataset, procedure and result using more than ten different methods. Among all methods, cell-by-cell comparison and landscape analysis were most frequently applied in the CA model assessment; specifically, overall accuracy and standard Kappa coefficient respectively rank first and second among all metrics. The end-state assessment is often criticized by modelers because it cannot adequately reflect the modeling ability of CA models. We provide five suggestions to the method selection, aiming to offer a background framework for future method choices as well as urging to focus on the assessment of input data and error propagation, procedure, quantitative and spatial change, and the impact of driving factors.