A multi‐criteria decision‐making approach for geometric matching of areal objects

Abstract We propose a method for geometric areal object matching based on multi‐criteria decision making. To enable this method, we focused on determining the matched areal object pairs that have all relations, one‐to‐one relationships to many‐to‐many relationships, in different spatial data sets by fusing geometric criteria without user invention. First, we identified candidate corresponding areal object pairs with a graph‐based approach in training data. Second, three matching criteria (areal hausdorff distance, intersection ratio, and turning function distance) were calculated in candidate corresponding pairs and these criteria were normalized. Third, the shape similarity was calculated by weighted linear combination using the normalized matching criteria (similarities) with the criteria importance through intercriteria correlation method. Fourth, a threshold (0.738) of the shape similarity estimated in the plot of precision versus recall versus all possible thresholds of training data was applied, and the matched pairs were determined and identified. Finally, we visually validated the detection of similar areal feature pairs and conducted statistical evaluation using precision, recall, and F‐measure values from a confusion matrix. Their values were 0.905, 0.848, and 0.876, respectively. These results validate that the proposed classifier, which detects 87.6% of matched areal pairs, is highly accurate.