@inproceedings{fobinsutezo2023poverty,
author = {Fobi Nsutezo, Simone and Cardona, Manuel and Collins, Elliott and Robinson, Caleb and Ortiz, Anthony and Sederholm, Tina and Dodhia, Rahul and Lavista Ferres, Juan M.},
title = {Poverty rate prediction using multi-modal survey and earth observation data},
booktitle = {COMPASS '23: ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies},
year = {2023},
month = {July},
abstract = {This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained from a single-step featurization method applied to freely available 10m/px Sentinel-2 surface reflectance satellite imagery. These visual features are combined with ten survey questions in a proxy means test (PMT) to estimate whether a household is below the poverty line. We show that the inclusion of visual features reduces the mean error in poverty rate estimates from 4.09% to 3.88% over a nationally representative out-of-sample test set. In addition to including satellite imagery features in proxy means tests, we propose an approach for selecting a subset of survey questions that are complementary to the visual features extracted from satellite imagery. Specifically, we design a survey variable selection approach guided by the full survey and image features and use the approach to determine the most relevant set of small survey questions to include in a PMT. We validate the choice of small survey questions in a downstream task of predicting the poverty rate using the small set of questions. This approach results in the best performance -- errors in poverty rate decrease from 4.09% to 3.71%. We show that extracted visual features encode geographic and urbanization differences between regions.},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/poverty-rate-prediction-using-multi-modal-survey-and-earth-observation-data/},
}