Beyond city pairs: Higher-order information in urban growth across borders

We apply higher-order information measures to urban growth across borders and spatial units. We analyse 8,808 functional urban areas using gridded GDP estimates allocated from national accounts. Negative estimated O-information occurs in 29.93% of cross-border triplets and 2.00% of domestic triplets. This fifteen-fold contrast falls to fourfold at comparable dependence strength and persists under data-quality restrictions. Target-specific decompositions show how information overlaps or combines across cities. Administrative subdivisions have mean O-information within matched random-map ranges inside countries. These findings show why interpreting geographic dependence requires specifying comparison cities and spatial units, while economic connections remain to be established independently.

Source: arXiv:2610.31159v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31159v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.31159v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31159v1