Beyond city pairs: Higher-order information in urban growth across borders
Abstract
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.
Related
- Free Mutual Information and Higher-Point Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators
- Quantum information spreading via higher-order operator correlators
- Higher-order quantum information inequalities and error-correction of non-Markovian noise
- A scalable estimator of higher-order information in complex dynamical systems
- Control of Harmful Information Spreading on Adaptive Higher-Order Networks via Group Dissolution
BibTeX
@misc{hourican2026beyond,
title = {{Beyond city pairs: Higher-order information in urban growth across borders}},
author = {Cillian Hourican and Debraj Roy},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.31159},
eprint = {2610.31159},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31159},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Beyond city pairs: Higher-order information in urban growth across borders
AU - Cillian Hourican
AU - Debraj Roy
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.31159
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31159
AB - 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.
ER -