Cellular automata (CA) models are in growing use for land-use change simulation and future scenario prediction. It is necessary to conduct model assessment that reports the quality of simulation results and how well the models reproduce reliable spatial patterns. Here, we review 347 CA articles published during 1999–2018 identified by a Scholar Google search using ‘cellular automata’, ‘land’ and ‘urban’ as keywords. Our review demonstrates that, during the past two decades, 89% of the publications include model assessment related to dataset, procedure and result using more than ten different methods. Among all methods, cell-by-cell comparison and landscape analysis were most frequently applied in the CA model assessment; specifically, overall accuracy and standard Kappa coefficient respectively rank first and second among all metrics. The end-state assessment is often criticized by modelers because it cannot adequately reflect the modeling ability of CA models. We provide five suggestions to the method selection, aiming to offer a background framework for future method choices as well as urging to focus on the assessment of input data and error propagation, procedure, quantitative and spatial change, and the impact of driving factors.

The dynamic relationships between land use change and its driving forces vary spatially and can be identified by geographically weighted regression (GWR). We present a novel cellular automata (GWR-CA) model that incorporates GWR-derived spatially varying relationships to simulate land use change. Our GWR-CA model is characterized by spatially nonstationary transition rules that fully address local interactions in land use change. More importantly, each driving factor in our GWR model contains effects that both promote and resist land use change. We applied GWR-CA to simulate rapid land use change in Suzhou City on the Yangtze River Delta from 2000 to 2015. The GWR coefficients were visualized to highlight their spatial patterns and local variation, which are closely associated with their effects on land use change. The transition rules indicate low land conversion potential in the city’s center and outer suburbs, but higher land conversion potential in the inner near suburbs along the belt expressway. Residual statistics show that GWR fits the input data better than logistic regression (LR). Compared with an LR-based CA model, GWR-CA improves overall accuracy by 4.1% and captures 5.5% more urban growth, suggesting that GWR-CA may be superior in modeling land use change. Our results demonstrate that the GWR-CA model is effective in capturing spatially varying land transition rules to produce more realistic results, and is suitable for simulating land use change and urban expansion in rapidly urbanizing regions.