Related papers: Interpreting wealth distribution via poverty map i…
Progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is hampered by a persistent lack of data regarding key social, environmental, and economic indicators, particularly in developing countries. For example, data on poverty --- the first…
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…
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…
In this paper, we use deep learning to estimate living conditions in India. We use both census and surveys to train the models. Our procedure achieves comparable results to those found in the literature, but for a wide range of outcomes.
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…
Road networks are among the most essential components of a country's infrastructure. By facilitating the movement and exchange of goods, people, and ideas, they support economic and cultural activity both within and across borders.…
The Government of Mexico's social development agency, SEDESOL, is responsible for the administration of social services and has the mission of lifting Mexican families out of poverty. One key challenge they face is matching people who have…
Surprisingly a number of Earth's waterways remain unmapped, with a significant number in low and middle income countries. Here we build a computer vision model (WaterNet) to learn the location of waterways in the United States, based on…
I generalize state-of-the-art approaches that decompose differences in the distribution of a variable of interest between two groups into a portion explained by covariates and a residual portion. The method that I propose relaxes the…
Humanitarian mapping from space with machine learning helps policy-makers to timely and accurately identify people in need. However, recent concerns around fairness and transparency of algorithmic decision-making are a significant obstacle…
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…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
As climate change intensifies, the urgency for accurate global-scale disaster predictions grows. This research presents a novel multimodal disaster prediction framework, combining weather statistics, satellite imagery, and textual insights.…
The choice of appropriate measures of deprivation, identification and aggregation of poverty has been a challenge for many years. The works of Sen, Atkinson and others have been the cornerstone for most of the literature on poverty…
The UN Sustainable Development Goals allude to the importance of infrastructure quality in three of its seventeen goals. However, monitoring infrastructure quality in developing regions remains prohibitively expensive and impedes efforts to…
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the number one Sustainable Development Goal of the UN 2030 Agenda. To monitor the progress towards such an ambitious target, reliable, up-to-date and fine-grained measurements of socioeconomic…
We introduce a simple yet effective early fusion method for crop yield prediction that handles multiple input modalities with different temporal and spatial resolutions. We use high-resolution crop yield maps as ground truth data to train…
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…
Poverty maps are used to aid important political decisions such as allocation of development funds by governments and international organizations. Those decisions should be based on the most accurate poverty figures. However, often reliable…
In low and middle income countries, household surveys are a valuable source of information for a range of health and demographic indicators. Increasingly, subnational estimates are required for targeting interventions and evaluating…