Exploring Budgeted Learning for Data-Driven Semantic Inference via Urban Functions

The performance of a machine learning algorithm is dependent on the quality of the available data for model development. However, in practical situations, the availability of the data is variable and can be limited. This limitation creates a budget problem for data-driven techniques and the objective in such situations is to develop the best model given the available data. In this article, we examine the budgeted learning problem for spatial data within the urban context. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a novel approach for inferring the attributes of spatial data when the data for the model is budgeted. This is achieved using urban functions - which describe the designated use of a geographical space - to infer the types of streets in a city. We evaluated the approach by comparing the performance of the model using the data in each urban function (the budget) against the results from the aggregate of all the functions (all data). The results indicate that with our model, individual urban functions are sufficient to infer the type attributes of streets.