Abstract
Different studies have been carried out to evaluate the progress made by countries and cities towards achieving sustainability to compare its evolution. However, the micro-territorial level, which encompasses a community perspective, has not been examined through a comprehensive forecasting method of sustainability categories with machine learning tools. This study aims to establish a method to forecast the sustainability levels of an urban ecosystem through supervised modeling. To this end, it was necessary to establish a set of indicators that characterize the dimensions of sustainable development, consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals. Using the data normalization technique to process the information and combining it in different dimensions made it possible to identify the sustainability level of the urban zone for each year from 2009 to 2017. The resulting information was the basis for the supervised classification. It was found that the sustainability level in the micro-territory has been improving from a low level in 2009, which increased to a medium level in the subsequent years. Forecasts of the sustainability levels of the zone were possible by using decision trees, neural networks, and support vector machines, in which 70% of the data were used to train the machine learning tools, with the remaining 30% used for validation. According to the performance metrics, decision trees outperformed the other two tools.
Highlights
Sustainable development has been a significant challenge for nations, which is supported by, among other aspects, the environmental and socio-economic impacts associated with registered population growth
This study considered a characteristic parameter called “habitability”, which is reflected in the relation between the environmental and social dimensions [7], in which indicators that describe the environmental health of a territory are relevant
A set of 81 indicators was established to be used as inputs for the process
Summary
Sustainable development has been a significant challenge for nations, which is supported by, among other aspects, the environmental and socio-economic impacts associated with registered population growth. The primary objective in addressing this challenge is to provide an orientation for a sustained improvement in the population’s living conditions, which faces poverty, disease (associated with environmental and social determinants), and violence, among other situations. In this regard, the development and implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) play an important role in determining the progress made towards achieving sustainable development. Notwithstanding the global nature of the term [2,3], studies primarily focus on analyzing three fundamental pillars, environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Each dimension has its own specific challenges with respect to territorial conditions, in addition to being connected and integrated with one another, in order to make sustainable development achievable
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