Measuring Toronto's vital signs – Comparing global and local ideal point analysis in an urban equity case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) offers a unique analytical lens for examining socio-economic indicators within cities. Competing, interrelated criteria are combined to produce a single weighted score for each location or spatial unit. The Toronto Foundation's Vital Signs report provides an annual snapshot of Toronto's quality of life, using ten indicator categories. While the report is published at a city scale, a spatially explicit approach could offer a deeper interpretation of the results. While global MCDA methods can conceal geographic variation, novel local techniques account for spatial heterogeneity in relevant characteristics. In this paper, a localized ideal point method, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), was applied to the Vital Signs report. The results show more variation and less spatial autocorrelation than the global approach and a simplified representation of the report. GIS researchers are increasingly exploring local MCDA approaches using vector data, but the more complex techniques such as TOPSIS are relatively underdeveloped. This case study aims to fill this conceptual gap and illustrate the applicability of local ideal point analysis in an urban equity context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".