Related papers: Household poverty classification in data-scarce en…
Do today's communication technologies hold potential to alleviate poverty? The mobile phone's accessibility and use allows us with an unprecedented volume of data on social interactions, mobility and more. Can this data help us better…
Knowing where people live is a fundamental component of many decision making processes such as urban development, infectious disease containment, evacuation planning, risk management, conservation planning, and more. While bottom-up, survey…
Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund…
Machine learning algorithms can now outperform classic economic models in predicting quantities ranging from bargaining outcomes, to choice under uncertainty, to an individual's future jobs and wages. Yet this predictive accuracy comes at a…
Census data provide detailed information about population characteristics at a coarse resolution. Nevertheless, fine-grained, high-resolution mappings of population counts are increasingly needed to characterize population dynamics and to…
In low- and middle-income countries, household surveys are the most reliable data source to examine health and demographic indicators at the subnational level, an exercise in small area estimation. Model-based unit-level models are favored…
Housing quality is an essential proxy for regional wealth, security and health. Understanding the distribution of housing quality is crucial for unveiling rural development status and providing political proposals. However,present rural…
Reliable data about the stock of physical capital and infrastructure in developing countries is typically very scarce. This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…
Identifying the most deprived regions of any country or city is key if policy makers are to design successful interventions. However, locating areas with the greatest need is often surprisingly challenging in developing countries. Due to…
Cities are characterized by the coexistence of general aggregate patterns, along with many local variations. This poses challenges for analyses of urban phenomena, which tend to be either too aggregated or too local, depending on the…
While machine learning has emerged in recent years as a useful tool for rapid prediction of materials properties, generating sufficient data to reliably train models without overfitting is still impractical for many applications. Towards…
Reliable statistical information is important to make political decisions on a sound basis and to help measure the impact of policies. Unfortunately, statistics offices in developing countries have scarce resources and statistical censuses…
Fine resolution estimates of demographic and socioeconomic attributes are crucial for planning and policy development. While several efforts have been made to produce fine-scale gridded population estimates, socioeconomic features are…
We study the problem of selecting limited features to observe such that models trained on them can perform well simultaneously across multiple subpopulations. This problem has applications in settings where collecting each feature is…
This study conducts a benchmarking study, comparing 23 different statistical and machine learning methods in a credit scoring application. In order to do so, the models' performance is evaluated over four different data sets in combination…
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to predict poverty and development indicators from satellite images with surprising accuracy. This paper presents a first attempt at analyzing the CNNs responses in detail and…
Knowledge of population distribution is critical for building infrastructure, distributing resources, and monitoring the progress of sustainable development goals. Although censuses can provide this information, they are typically conducted…
The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…
Structural transformation, the shift from agrarian economies to more diversified industrial and service-based systems, is a key driver of economic development. However, in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), data scarcity and…
Traditional sources of population data, such as censuses and surveys, are costly, infrequent, and often unavailable in crisis-affected regions. Mobile phone application data offer near real-time, high-resolution insights into population…