Avit Bhoumick has shown you a easier way but it is academic, useful in completing an academic project. Kasper has shown you a right way if you intend to predict really. I am showing you the way assuming that you are on task of planning and want to reach implementable conclusion.

Firstly future is unpredictable. In history we do not find any example where the prediction was done in land use simply because transitions depend upon numerous variables of development in future. e.g. Govt. policies to people's attitude to technological development. YET PREDICTION IS MANDATORY FOR PLANNING THE FUTURE.

Hence the best way is to try to study THE PRESENT TREND INSTEAD OF TRYING TO SURVEY THE PAST TREND, that does not really help. Primarily because the trends do also change, forward backward, left right. One should take up a huge survey and opinion collection of a huge no. of people from various walks of life. PARTICULARLY NEW GENERATION. Their aspirations, expectations, direction of thoughts, govt. plans, Success and failure of plans, Corporate sector, International scenario, Agriculture, expansion of urban areas, whether the migration may reverse (Strong reversal trends are seen in some regions where rural development in form of rural industries is taking place fast) and what not. IT IS A HUGE TASK. But in my opinion there is no other realist way. To collect information, to find a futuristic trend out of it, predict periods, directions, scale etc. is further difficult and should be done with collective analysis. (Not by a single brain) You will have to live long to see the extent of success of your planning done on the basis of these prediction. EVEN YOU SUCCEED 10% YOU SHOULD PAT YOURSELF.

The straight forward answer to your question would be to pick the analogous one to future scenario. Ideally, claiming one transition period to be more analogous than the other to the uncertain future would be a difficult task unless you develop scenarios of given conditions. As you explained that the transition matrices appeared to be different, I would expect the prevailing scenarios to be different as well, e.g. population growth, the cardinal direction to where the most change took place etc. Therefore it would be wise to develop such scenarios when you calibrated the land changes in two transition periods and thereby you can predict the future change under those scenarios. Supporting literature could be found about the cellular automation of urban growth. Hope that helps.

First of all, I would be very careful with the word "predict". Whichever period you take, you can be sure that the future will be different.

Secondly, the beauty of scenarios is that you can do several runs, in your case three, where you can evaluated how LU change will progress based on either period 1, period 2, or period 1+2. You could then look at maps that combine these three scenarios and see:

- which areas change indpendent of the parameterisation of the model?

- which areas always stay the same"?

- which areas change under one scenario, but not under the other.

Finally, in any case I would try to construct scenarios that are different from the these three, and that try to incorporate other future possibilities.

Avit Bhoumick has shown you a easier way but it is academic, useful in completing an academic project. Kasper has shown you a right way if you intend to predict really. I am showing you the way assuming that you are on task of planning and want to reach implementable conclusion.

Firstly future is unpredictable. In history we do not find any example where the prediction was done in land use simply because transitions depend upon numerous variables of development in future. e.g. Govt. policies to people's attitude to technological development. YET PREDICTION IS MANDATORY FOR PLANNING THE FUTURE.

Hence the best way is to try to study THE PRESENT TREND INSTEAD OF TRYING TO SURVEY THE PAST TREND, that does not really help. Primarily because the trends do also change, forward backward, left right. One should take up a huge survey and opinion collection of a huge no. of people from various walks of life. PARTICULARLY NEW GENERATION. Their aspirations, expectations, direction of thoughts, govt. plans, Success and failure of plans, Corporate sector, International scenario, Agriculture, expansion of urban areas, whether the migration may reverse (Strong reversal trends are seen in some regions where rural development in form of rural industries is taking place fast) and what not. IT IS A HUGE TASK. But in my opinion there is no other realist way. To collect information, to find a futuristic trend out of it, predict periods, directions, scale etc. is further difficult and should be done with collective analysis. (Not by a single brain) You will have to live long to see the extent of success of your planning done on the basis of these prediction. EVEN YOU SUCCEED 10% YOU SHOULD PAT YOURSELF.