Bridging Spectral Statistics and Machine Learning for Semantic Road Network Analysis

Accurate identification of road network intersections is essential for urban planning, autonomous navigation, and traffic safety analysis. However, standard approaches relying on local geometric attributes often overlook essential topological information. This limitation is particularly problematic for intersection types that are locally similar but topologically distinct. To address this, we propose a hybrid framework that augments intrinsic node attributes with Generalized Random Dot Product Graph embeddings and neighbor-aggregated features. We utilize tree-based ensemble classifiers, specifically Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting, to process this enriched feature set. Unlike standard spectral methods that assume homophily, this approach explicitly models heterophilous connectivity to capture structural patterns where dissimilar nodes connect. Experiments on a real-world urban road network demonstrate that this topological augmentation yields consistent and robust improvements. The proposed integration with the Extreme Gradient Boosting model achieves a Macro ROC AUC of 0.8966 and a Micro F1 score of 0.7005, outperforming the baseline model (ROC AUC 0.8100, Micro F1 0.5919). Performance gains are most pronounced for topologically ambiguous intersection classes, confirming that local attributes alone fail to capture structural distinctions. These results demonstrate that latent structural context is a critical discriminator for granular road intersection classification.

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Publication Details

Journal
Geomatics
Published
2026-04-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/geomatics6020035
Primary Topic
Automated Road and Building Extraction
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Bridging Spectral Statistics and Machine Learning for Semantic Road Network Analysis

Arpan Man Sainju, Ramchandra Rimal, Abigail Kelly
Geomatics
Automated Road and Building Extraction
article

Bridging Spectral Statistics and Machine Learning for Semantic Road Network Analysis

Arpan Man Sainju, Ramchandra Rimal, Abigail Kelly
article en

Abstract

Accurate identification of road network intersections is essential for urban planning, autonomous navigation, and traffic safety analysis. However, standard approaches relying on local geometric attributes often overlook essential topological information. This limitation is particularly problematic for intersection types that are locally similar but topologically distinct. To address this, we propose a hybrid framework that augments intrinsic node attributes with Generalized Random Dot Product Graph embeddings and neighbor-aggregated features. We utilize tree-based ensemble classifiers, specifically Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting, to process this enriched feature set. Unlike standard spectral methods that assume homophily, this approach explicitly models heterophilous connectivity to capture structural patterns where dissimilar nodes connect. Experiments on a real-world urban road network demonstrate that this topological augmentation yields consistent and robust improvements. The proposed integration with the Extreme Gradient Boosting model achieves a Macro ROC AUC of 0.8966 and a Micro F1 score of 0.7005, outperforming the baseline model (ROC AUC 0.8100, Micro F1 0.5919). Performance gains are most pronounced for topologically ambiguous intersection classes, confirming that local attributes alone fail to capture structural distinctions. These results demonstrate that latent structural context is a critical discriminator for granular road intersection classification.

GeomaticsVol. 6(2)
Middle Tennessee State University (US)
Middle Tennessee State University
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 34%
Automated Road and Building Extraction
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