Exploring the Contributions by Transportation Features to Urban Economy: An Experiment of a Scalable Tree-Boosting Algorithm with Big Data

Previous studies regarding transportation impacts on economic development in urban areas have three major issues—the limited scope of analysis mostly with the change of property values, the exclusion of smart transportation systems as features despite their potential for urban areas, and stereotyped approaches with limited types of variables. To surmount such limitations, this research adopted the concept of Big Data with machine learning techniques. As such, a total of 67 features from main categories, including the change of business, geographical boundary, socio-economic, land value, transportation, smart transportation, sales, and floating population were analyzed with XGBoost and SHAP algorithms. Given that the rise and fall of business is a major consideration for economic development in urban areas, the change in the total number of sales was selected as a target value. As a result, sales-related features showed the largest contribution to the rise of business, among others. It was also noted that features related to smart transportation systems obviously affected the success of business, even more than traditional ones from transportation. It is thus expected that the findings from this research will provide insights for decision-makers and researchers to make customized policies for boosting economic development in urban areas that are a major part of the urban economy to achieve sustainability.