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Title: Space syntax visibility graph analysis is not robust to changes in spatial and temporal resolution
Space syntax is an influential framework for quantifying the relationship between environmental geometry and human behavior. Although many studies report high syntactic–behavioral correlations, previous pedestrian data were collected at low spatiotemporal resolutions, and data transformations and sampling strategies vary widely; here, we systematically test the robustness of space syntax’s predictive strength by examining how these factors impact correlations. We used virtual reality and motion tracking to correlate 30 syntactic measures with high resolution walking trajectories downsampled at 10 grid resolutions and subjected to various log transformations. Overall, correlations declined with increasing grid resolution and were sensitive to data transformations. Moreover, simulations revealed spuriously high correlations (e.g. R 2  = 1) with sparsely sampled data (<23 locations). These results strongly suggest that syntactic–behavioral correlations are not robust to changes in spatiotemporal resolution, and that high correlations obtained in previous studies could be inflated due to transformations, data resolution, or sampling strategies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
0843940
PAR ID:
10214044
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
ISSN:
2399-8083
Page Range / eLocation ID:
239980831989762
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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