The sensitivity of spatial analytic results to the way in which the areal units are defined is known as the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). Although to date a general solution to the problem does not yet exist, it has been suggested in the literature that the effects of the problem may be controllable within specific application contexts. The current study pursues this line of inquiry and addresses the MAUP in the context of residential location choice modeling.Previous residential location choice analysis typically involves the representation of alternative locations by areal units and the measurement of residential neighborhood characteristics based on these areal units. This study demonstrates the vulnerability of such an approach to effects of the MAUP. We contend that the fundamental issue is the inconsistency between the analyst's definition of areal units and the decision maker's perception of residential neighborhoods. An alternative approach of using a multi-scale modeling structure is proposed to mimic the notion of a neighborhood being a hierarchy of residential groupings. The proposed approach allows the spatial extent of choice factors to be determined endogenously. We show that the multi-scale approach produces richer and more interpretable results than its single scale counterpart.Guo and Bhat 1
INTRODUCTIONGeneralization is an innate skill that we use all the time. We generalize about people, things and events. We generalize by filtering everything that we absorb with our five senses through our values, beliefs, attitudes and experiences. During the process, trivial details are deleted and attention is devoted to important features. Generalization is also an important consideration in the scientific analysis of data. As analysts, we collapse and aggregate observations in order to make the data more workable to the problem at hand, to gain understanding of the phenomenon in question, and to uncover patterns confounded by the noise typically found in observations. Filtering, in this case, is performed through what statisticians refer to as the data's support (1), that is, the units within which the aggregate measures of observations are computed. A data's support is characterized by its geometrical shape, size, and orientation. A change in any of these characteristics defines a new variable (2). For instance, when aggregating traffic counts observed on a link, we can use hours of a day, or days of a week, as the temporal units (supports) to arrive at hourly traffic volume, or daily traffic volume (variables). Different link volume variables derived from different choice of units will result in different interpretations about the observed traffic counts. This dependency of data interpretations on support is referred as the support effect.The problems generated by support effects are ubiquitous. In studying spatial phenomenon, we often aggregate spatially scattered observations into predefined areal units, or spatial support. During the aggregation process, information is lost about the...