• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.251-266
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• 2016

Intelligent interpolation methods such as dasymetric mapping are considered to be the best way to disaggregate zone-based population data by observing and utilizing the internal variation within each source zone. This research reviews the advantages and problems of the dasymetric mapping method, and presents a geographically weighted regression (GWR) based method to take into consideration the spatial heterogeneity of population density - land cover relationship. The locally adaptive intelligent interpolation method is able to make use of readily available ancillary information in the public domain without the need for additional data processing. In the case study, we use the preclassified National Land Cover Dataset 2011 to test the performance of the proposed method (i.e. the GWR-based multi-class dasymetric method) compared to four other popular population estimation methods (i.e. areal weighting interpolation, pycnophylactic interpolation, binary dasymetric method, and globally fitted ordinary least squares (OLS) based multi-class dasymetric method). The GWR-based multi-class dasymetric method outperforms all other methods. It is attributed to the fact that spatial heterogeneity is accounted for in the process of determining density parameters for land cover classes.