Related papers: Leveraging Compact Satellite Embeddings and Graph …
In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We demonstrate how advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can help ameliorate these…
Data-driven landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) typically relies on landslide conditioning factors (LCFs), whose availability, heterogeneity, and preprocessing-related uncertainties can constrain mapping reliability. Recently, Google…
Wide coverage and high-precision rural household wealth data is an important support for the effective connection between the national macro rural revitalization policy and micro rural entities, which helps to achieve precise allocation of…
Satellite-based slum segmentation holds significant promise in generating global estimates of urban poverty. However, the morphological heterogeneity of informal settlements presents a major challenge, hindering the ability of models…
We introduce a novel machine learning approach to leverage historical and contemporary maps and systematically predict economic statistics. Our simple algorithm extracts meaningful features from the maps based on their color compositions…
Accurate and up-to-date land cover maps are essential for understanding land use change, a key driver of climate change. Geospatial embeddings offer a more efficient and accessible way to map landscape features, yet their use in real-world…
The application of state-of-the-art spatial econometric models requires that the information about the spatial coordinates of statistical units is completely accurate, which is usually the case in the context of areal data. With…
This paper reviews the state of the art in satellite and machine learning based poverty estimates and finds some interesting results. The most important factors correlated to the predictive power of welfare in the reviewed studies are the…
Many studies have predicted SocioEconomic Position (SEP) for aggregated spatial units such as villages using satellite data, but SEP prediction at the household level and other sources of imagery have not been yet explored. We assembled a…
Field-scale crop maps support supply-chain forecasting and policy, yet statewide crop identification still often depends on retrospective surveys or remote-sensing workflows built around hand-engineered spectral features. Those pipelines…
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…
Satellite image analysis has important implications for land use, urbanization, and ecosystem monitoring. Deep learning methods can facilitate the analysis of different satellite modalities, such as electro-optical (EO) and synthetic…
Accurate local-level poverty measurement is an essential task for governments and humanitarian organizations to track the progress towards improving livelihoods and distribute scarce resources. Recent computer vision advances in using…
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…
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,…
We present a semi-supervised approach that disaggregates refugee statistics from administrative boundaries to 0.5-degree grid cells across 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. By integrating UNHCR's ProGres registration data with…
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…
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to…
In almost any geostatistical analysis, one of the underlying, often implicit, modelling assump- tions is that the spatial locations, where measurements are taken, are recorded without error. In this study we develop geostatistical inference…
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,…