arXiv Machine Learning By Pedro Lemes Sixel Lobo, Eric Tokuda, Kuruvilla Joseph Abraham, Roberto Fray, Dirce Maria Marchioni, Alexandre Cl\'audio Botazzo Delbem, Rogerio Salvini

District-Level Food Environment Indicators and Social Vulnerability in S\~ao Paulo

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This study examined whether food retail and street‑market indicators differentiate social vulnerability levels across 76 districts of São Paulo. Using machine‑learning classifiers on district‑level data, the authors found that densities of healthy and unhealthy food establishments explained about 60 % of feature importance, with XGBoost achieving the highest mean F‑score (0.75). The results suggest that publicly available food‑environment data are linked to district‑level social vulnerability, though limitations such as small sample size and cross‑sectional design restrict causal inference.

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