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We describe a method to identify poor households in data-scarce countries by leveraging information contained in nationally representative household surveys. It employs standard statistical learning techniques---cross-validation and…
Despite their popularity, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are not always available for the purposes of advertising measurement. Non-experimental data is thus required. However, Facebook and other ad platforms use complex and evolving…
Can we use data on the biographies of historical figures to estimate the GDP per capita of countries and regions? Here we introduce a machine learning method to estimate the GDP per capita of dozens of countries and hundreds of regions in…
This research proposes a model to predict the location of the most deprived areas in a city using data from the census. Census data is very high-dimensional and needs to be simplified. We use the diffusion map algorithm to reduce…
Deploying an algorithmically informed policy is a significant intervention in society. Prominent methods for algorithmic fairness focus on the distribution of predictions at the time of training, rather than the distribution of social goods…
A lack of financial access, which is often an issue in many central-city U.S. neighborhoods, can be linked to higher interest rates as well as negative health and psychological outcomes. A number of analyses of "banking deserts" have also…
Transportation systems can be conceptualized as an instrument of spreading people and resources over the territory, playing an important role in developing sustainable cities. The current rationale of transport provision is based on…
Urban to rural migration is a less-researched phenomenon compared to its counterpart: rural to urban migration. In parts of Europe, an increasing number of people living in big urban centers within the country, or moving from other…
Understanding how social situations unfold in people's daily lives is relevant to designing mobile systems that can support users in their personal goals, well-being, and activities. As an alternative to questionnaires, some studies have…
In this paper, we consider the problem of predicting demographics of geographic units given geotagged Tweets that are composed within these units. Traditional survey methods that offer demographics estimates are usually limited in terms of…
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…
We use exploratory factor analysis to investigate the online persistence of known community-level patterns of social capital variance in the U.S. context. Our analysis focuses on Facebook groups, specifically those that tend to connect…
Lifestyles are a valuable model for understanding individuals' physical and mental lives, comparing social groups, and making recommendations for improving people's lives. In this paper, we examine and compare lifestyle behaviors of people…
Over a billion people live in slums in settlements that are often located in ecologically sensitive areas and hence highly vulnerable. This is a problem in many parts of the world, but it is more prominent in low-income countries, where in…
The emergence of social networks and the definition of suitable generative models for synthetic yet realistic social graphs are widely studied problems in the literature. By not being tied to any real data, random graph models cannot…
The spatial distribution of income shapes the structure and organisation of cities and its understanding has broad societal implications. Despite an abundant literature, many issues remain unclear. In particular, all definitions of…
While much effort has been devoted to understand the role of intra-urban characteristics on sustainability and growth, much remains to be understood about the effect of inter-urban interactions and the role cities have in determining each…
This study develops a new method to quantify neighborhood activity levels at high spatial and temporal resolutions and test whether, and to what extent, behavioral responses to social distancing policies vary with socioeconomic and…
Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In…
Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country's census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural…