Science· 2015Q1
Predicting poverty and wealth from mobile phone metadata
- 707citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2015year
Short summary
Mobile phone call and data records can accurately predict an individual's socioeconomic status and reconstruct national wealth distribution, offering a low-cost alternative to traditional surveys in developing countries.
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Key points
- Mobile phone metadata accurately predicts individual socioeconomic status.
- Aggregated individual predictions reconstruct national and microregional wealth distribution.
- This method provides localized and timely information at a fraction of traditional survey costs.
- The approach is particularly valuable in developing countries with limited census data.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Accurate and timely estimates of population characteristics are a critical input to social and economic research and policy. In industrialized economies, novel sources of data are enabling new approaches to demographic profiling, but in developing countries, fewer sources of big data exist. We show that an individual's past history of mobile phone use can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic status. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the predicted attributes of millions of individuals can, in turn, accurately reconstruct the distribution of wealth of an entire nation or to infer the asset distribution of microregions composed of just a few households. In resource-constrained environments where censuses and household surveys are rare, this approach creates an option for gathering localized and timely information at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Science, 2015 · DOI ↗
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Field: Transportation
TransportationSocial Sciences