A Multiscale Flow-Focused Geographically Weighted Regression Modelling Approach and Its Application for Transport Flows on Expressways

Scale is a fundamental geographical concept and its role in different geographical contexts has been widely documented. The increasing availability of transport mobility data, in the form of big datasets, enables further incorporation of spatial dependencies and non-stationarity into spatial interaction modeling of transport flows. In this paper a newly developed multiscale flow-focused geographically weighted regression (MFGWR) approach has been applied, in addition to global and local Moran I indices of flow data, to model multiscale socio-economic determinants of regional transport flows between counties across the Jiangsu Province in China. The results have confirmed the power of local Moran I of flow data for identifying urban agglomerations and the effectiveness of MFGWR in exploring multiscale processes of spatial interactions. A comparison between MFGWR and flow-focused geographically weighted regression (FGWR) showed that the MFGWR approach can better interpret the heterogeneous processes of spatial interaction.