Spatial Autoregressive Model for Population Estimation at the Census Block Level Using LIDAR-derived Building Volume Information

Abstract

The collection of population by census is laborious, time consuming and expensive, and often only available at limited temporal and spatial scales. Remote sensing based population estimation has been employed as a viable alternative for providing population estimates based on indicators that make use of two-dimensional areal information of buildings or one-dimensional length information of roads The recent advancement of LIDAR remote sensing provides the opportunity to add the third dimension of height information into the modeling of population distribution. This study explores the use of building volumes derived from LIDAR as a population indicator. Our study shows the volume-based model consistently outperforms area and length-based models at the census block level. Additionally, the study examines the impact of spatial autocorrelation, the presence of which violates the independence assumption of the traditional OLS models. To address this problem, a spatial autoregressive model is employed to account...