Related papers: Using maps to predict economic activity
Up-to-date poverty maps are an important tool for policy makers, but until now, have been prohibitively expensive to produce. We propose a generalizable prediction methodology to produce poverty maps at the village level using geospatial…
Urbanization is a common phenomenon in developing countries and it poses serious challenges when not managed effectively. Lack of proper planning and management may cause the encroachment of urban fabrics into reserved or special regions…
While measuring socioeconomic indicators is critical for local governments to make informed policy decisions, such measurements are often unavailable at fine-grained levels like municipality. This study employs deep learning-based…
High resolution datasets of population density which accurately map sparsely-distributed human populations do not exist at a global scale. Typically, population data is obtained using censuses and statistical modeling. More recently,…
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 This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…
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 study downscales the population and gross domestic product (GDP) scenarios given under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) into 0.5-degree grids. Our downscale approach has the following features: (i) it explicitly considers spatial…
In the same way as tree rings give us useful information about the climate many decades ago (or even centuries ago in the case of big trees), population pyramids allow us to know birth or death rates several decades earlier. Naturally, they…
High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for…
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…
Satellite imagery has long been an attractive data source that provides a wealth of information on human-inhabited areas. While super resolution satellite images are rapidly becoming available, little study has focused on how to extract…
Smartphones and other mobile devices are today pervasive across the globe. As an interesting side effect of the surge in mobile communications, mobile network operators can now easily collect a wealth of high-resolution data on the habits…
To better understand current trends of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, high-quality spatiotemporal population estimates are necessary. While the joint use of remote sensing and deep learning has achieved promising results for…
Quantifying the improvement in human living standard, as well as the city growth in developing countries, is a challenging problem due to the lack of reliable economic data. Therefore, there is a fundamental need for alternate, largely…
Accurate, fine-grained poverty maps remain scarce across much of the Global South. While Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) provide high-quality socioeconomic data, their spatial coverage is limited and reported coordinates are randomly…
Traffic congestion research is on the rise, thanks to urbanization, economic growth, and industrialization. Developed countries invest a lot of research money in collecting traffic data using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), loop…
High-resolution daytime satellite imagery has become a promising source to study economic activities. These images display detailed terrain over large areas and allow zooming into smaller neighborhoods. Existing methods, however, have…
The national census is an essential data source to support decision-making in many areas of public interest. However, this data may become outdated during the intercensal period, which can stretch up to several decades. We developed a…
About half of the world population already live in urban areas. It is projected that by 2050, approximately 70% of the world population will live in cities. In addition to this, most developing countries do not have reliable population…
We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for…