ALF-Score++, a novel approach to transfer knowledge and predict network-based walkability scores across cities

Walkability is an important measure with strong ties to our health. However, there are existing gaps in the literature. Our previous work proposed new approaches to address existing limitations. This paper explores new ways of applying transferability using transfer-learning. Road networks, POIs, and road-related characteristics grow/change over time. Moreover, calculating walkability for all locations in all cities is very time-consuming. Transferability enables reuse of already-learned knowledge for continued learning, reduce training time, resource consumption, training labels and improve prediction accuracy. We propose ALF-Score++, that reuses trained models to generate transferable models capable of predicting walkability score for cities not seen in the process. We trained transfer-learned models for St. John’s NL and Montréal QC and used them to predict walkability scores for Kingston ON and Vancouver BC. MAE error of 13.87 units (ranging 0–100) was achieved for transfer-learning using MLP and 4.56 units for direct-training (random forest) on personalized clusters.