arXiv AI

Joint Utilization of Geospatial and census proxies for Autoencoder-Assisted Downscaling (JUGAAD) of socioeconomic indicators in India

arXiv:2607. 20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monitoring poverty and food security indicators is imperative for addressing socioeconomic challenges in developing nations.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

DeepC4: Deep Conditional Census-Constrained Clustering for Large-scale Multitask Spatial Disaggregation of Urban Morphology

DeepC4 is a deep learning-based spatial disaggregation method that uses local census statistics as cluster-level constraints and incorporates multiple conditional label relationships in a multitask learning framework. Applied to Rwandan urban morphology, it achieves macro‑F1 scores of 0.63, 0.78, and 0.45 for roof, wall, and height prediction, respectively, and estimates national dwelling and occupant counts within about 1.1% error compared to census records. The approach outperforms existing GEM and METEOR methods and covers 32‑49% more 500‑meter grid pixels across provinces.

By Joshua Dimasaka, Christian Gei{\ss}, Emily So
arXiv AI
Jun 16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

arXiv:2602. 04525v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples.

By Muhammad Taha Mukhtar, Syed Musa Ali Kazmi, Khola Naseem, Muhammad Ali Chattha, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed, Muhammad Naseer Bajwa, Muhammad Imran Malik
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Crowd-Sourced Geographies of Income: Using Google Maps Points of Interest as High-Frequency Proxies for Sub-Municipal Income Estimation in Sao Paulo, Brazil

arXiv:2608. 07871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate, up-to-date income data at the sub-municipal scale is essential for social policy in middle-income countries, yet in Brazil it depends on a costly decennial census whose intercensal gap recently exceeded a decade.

By Adrienne C. Kinney, Anya Workman, Ademar Takeo Akabane, Jenna Barac, Paulo Fernando Braga Carvalho, Jeova Farias, Fernando Nascimento, Paulo Ricardo da Silva Oliveira
arXiv AI
Aug 19

MoRA: Mobility as the Backbone for Geospatial Representation Learning at Scale

MoRA is a human‑centric geospatial representation learning framework that uses a large mobility graph as its backbone to fuse spatial tokenization, graph neural networks, and asymmetric contrastive learning. It aligns over 100 million points of interest, massive remote sensing imagery, and structured demographic data with a billion‑edge mobility graph, producing compact 128‑dimensional embeddings that capture socio‑economic context and functional roles of locations. On a benchmark of nine downstream social and economic prediction tasks, MoRA outperforms state‑of‑the‑art models by an average of 12.9% and demonstrates scaling behavior analogous to large language models.

By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Qiyao Ma, Linyan Li, Xinhua Chen, Chris Webster, Yulun Zhou
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Transfer Learning for Socioeconomic Estimation in Forced-Displacement Settings

The paper presents a transfer‑learning approach that adapts a multimodal spatiotemporal vision transformer, originally trained on Demographic and Health Survey data, to estimate socioeconomic conditions in forced‑displacement settings. Using satellite‑derived geospatial covariates, the adapted model explains up to 66% of variation in socioeconomic outcomes in camp‑intersecting grids and 41% in non‑camp areas, achieving mean absolute errors of 4.37 and 5.41 index points respectively. This framework supplements periodic household surveys by providing regularly updated, spatially granular socioeconomic estimates that bridge data gaps between survey rounds.

By Steven Ndung'u, Adel Daoud, Ismael Yacoubou Djima, Hai-Anh H. Dang, Patrick Michael Brock
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Beyond Point Predictions: Uncertainty-Aware Satellite Poverty Mapping for Public Policy

The paper presents an uncertainty‑aware machine‑learning approach for mapping poverty in Africa using satellite imagery. By combining simultaneous quantile regression with a novel conformal prediction technique, the authors generate statistically guaranteed prediction intervals for neighborhood‑level International Wealth Index estimates, achieving high explanatory power (R² = 0.75) while acknowledging broader uncertainty. They also propose a risk‑controlled aid allocation procedure that leverages both survey data and model predictions, showing in simulations that it can deliver more aid per eligible recipient than alternative strategies.

By Markus B. Pettersson, James Bailie, Mohammad Kakooei, Eagon Meng, Adel Daoud