Simple Agents, Complex Emergent City: Agent-Based Modeling of Intraurban Migration - Computational Approaches for Urban Environments - page 138

Fig. 6.8 Intraurban migration from Robbinsdale

Tabl e 6. 1 Comparison of migration strategy using MST p at h length distribution
Decision-making strategy RMSE (m) d ( d )

Actual 4,962.08 4,626.66

Distance-only 3,908.477 3,655.031 3,042.45

Distance-plus-direction 5,051.047 3,042.447 2,713.88

private incentives related to housing, and consideration of how these landscapes
interact with personal and household attributes.
More broadly, this work addresses a key methodological challenge for many
urban modeling approaches, and especially for ABM, resisting the temptation to
make models complicated. With data becoming more plentiful and methods growing
increasingly sophisticated, models run the risk of committing what Lee ( 1973 )
termed the key “sins” of urban models, namely, being hyper-comprehensive and
complicated at the cost of parsimony and generalizability (Lee 1973 ;Klosterman
1994 ). ABMs are at particular risk because their core strength is demonstrating