Related papers: Using maps to predict economic activity
In many rural areas of low- and middle-income countries, weekly gatherings of buyers and sellers are the most tangible manifestation of the market economy. Knowing these markets' whereabouts and activity over time could provide insights in…
This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data. Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks…
Two out of three people will be living in urban areas by 2050, as projected by the United Nations, emphasizing the need for sustainable urban development and monitoring. Common urban footprint data provide high-resolution city extents but…
Gentrification--the transformation of a low-income urban area caused by the influx of affluent residents--has many revitalizing benefits. However, it also poses extremely concerning challenges to low-income residents. To help policymakers…
Accurate and consistent mapping of urban and rural areas is crucial for sustainable development, spatial planning, and policy design. It is particularly important in simulating the complex interactions between human activities and natural…
The study of human mobility is both of fundamental importance and of great potential value. For example, it can be leveraged to facilitate efficient city planning and improve prevention strategies when faced with epidemics. The newfound…
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…
Detailed population maps play an important role in diverse fields ranging from humanitarian action to urban planning. Generating such maps in a timely and scalable manner presents a challenge, especially in data-scarce regions. To address…
Poverty maps are essential tools for governments and NGOs to track socioeconomic changes and adequately allocate infrastructure and services in places in need. Sensor and online crowd-sourced data combined with machine learning methods have…
In 2023, 58.0% of the African population experienced moderate to severe food insecurity, with 21.6% facing severe food insecurity. Land-use and land-cover maps provide crucial insights for addressing food insecurity by improving…
Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging…
Many areas of the world are without basic information on the socioeconomic well-being of the residing population due to limitations in existing data collection methods. Overhead images obtained remotely, such as from satellite or aircraft,…
Transportation infrastructure, such as road or railroad networks, represent a fundamental component of our civilization. For sustainable planning and informed decision making, a thorough understanding of the long-term evolution of…
Humanitarian actions require accurate information to efficiently delegate support operations. Such information can be maps of building footprints, building functions, and population densities. While the access to this information is…
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…
We have modeled the employment/population ratio in the largest developed countries. Our results show that the evolution of the employment rate since 1970 can be predicted with a high accuracy by a linear dependence on the logarithm of real…
With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and…
Mobile sensing data has become a popular data source for geo-spatial analysis, however, mapping it accurately to other sources of information such as statistical data remains a challenge. Popular mapping approaches such as point allocation…
Obtaining detailed and reliable data about local economic livelihoods in developing countries is expensive, and data are consequently scarce. Previous work has shown that it is possible to measure local-level economic livelihoods using…
Fine-grained population maps are needed in several domains, like urban planning, environmental monitoring, public health, and humanitarian operations. Unfortunately, in many countries only aggregate census counts over large spatial units…