Complex Spatial Morphology of Urban Housing Price Based on Digital Elevation Model: A Case Study of Wuhan City, China

In a city, housing price varies with location. Thus, housing price plays an important role in detecting the spatial pattern of the city. Spatial interpolation methods have been widely used for simulating and predicting urban housing prices. In this paper, the Ordinary Kriging interpolation method is used for producing the digital elevation model (DEM) of urban housing prices. Based on the three-dimensional DEM of urban housing price, this paper develops a novel approach for geo-visual analytics of urban housing prices. To investigate and visualize the spatial morphology of housing price, we design the Water-flooding, Section-cutting and Belt-floating methods, and implement these methods with the 3D-analyst module in GIS environment. Then, we take Wuhan City as a case, apply this approach to analyze the complex spatial morphologic characteristics of the DEM for housing price and visualize the results from the multidimensional perspectives. The results show that the Water-flooding method effectively supports the investigation of the top areas of surface changes; Section-cutting method performs well in examining the profile or cross-section of the urban housing surface; and Belt-floating method is helpful for detecting the spatial variance of the urban housing surface through the routes of specific lines. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach works better than traditional methods in describing the complex spatial morphology of urban housing prices, and has an advantage in visualizing the analysis results.