Optimal urban competitiveness assessment using cloud computing and neural network

In the network economy domain, urban competitiveness refers to the comparison between cities in terms of competition and development. It is the ability to gain competitive advantage under different factors. The evaluation of urban competitiveness will help cities to learn from each other, and provides reference for the government to enhance urban competitiveness. Unlike various studies in the literature exploiting only the non-linear characteristics of urban competitiveness, this paper selects BP (Back Propagation) network as the main framework for evaluation. A Genetic Algorithm BP (GABP) network based on genetic optimization is utilized. The weights are optimized besides the crossover mutation of GA algorithm. To compensate the slow prediction in the stand-alone mode, this work proposes a MapReduce (MP) based method; MR-GABP via cloud computing. The model ensures effective urban competitiveness evaluation with improved convergence speed and threshold generation speed. The systematic experiments conducted verify effectiveness of the method while the results obtained reveal that performance of the method is better than the other methods in terms of accuracy and recall yielded as 95.1% and 92.6% respectively.