A Potts Model for Night Light and Human Population
The Potts model was one of the most popular physics models of the twentieth century in an interdisciplinary context. It has been applied to a large variety of problems. Many generalizations exists and a whole range of models were inspired by this statistical physics tool. Here we present how a generic Potts model can be used to study complex data. As a demonstration, we engage our model in the analysis of night light patterns of human settlements observed on space photographs.
physics.soc-ph↗