Machine Learning and Data Science for a Household-specific Poverty Level Prediction Task

Machine Learning and Data Science for a Household-specific Poverty Level Prediction Task
Author: Sudesh Kumar Venkatramolla
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

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This project focuses on a prediction task from the Kaggle data science challenge site: prediction of the poverty level of individual households using supervised classification learning. In Latin America, the Proxy Means Test (PMT) is the most popular method used to verify the income qualification. The PMT works by considering the observable properties of a household, such as the walls, ceilings, and electric devices in a family home. These and other general assets are used to classify the poverty level, assigning one of the four labels: (1) extreme poverty, (2) moderate poverty, (3) vulnerable households and (4) non-vulnerable households. The accuracy of learned classification models submitted as solutions to this data challenge has tended to decrease as a function of dataset size. Therefore, in this project, I am focusing on methods for boosting accuracy in detecting poverty level using committee machines (bagging, boosting, etc.) for supervised inductive learning. Because the task is classification learning, my first approach is to apply random forests (a decision tree ensemble method); depending on the accuracy, I will proceed with the advanced methods, such as light gradient-boosting methods (GBMs) and neural networks that are frequently used on large, complex multivariate classification tasks. The inference task is to predict the poverty level of a new household using attributes of the family home and other attributes found to be relevant by the learning algorithm. This enables use of cases of artificial intelligence for social good, such as helping governments and relief and economic development agencies to identify communities in need.

Consumer immobility predicts both macroeconomic contractions and household poverty during COVID-19

Consumer immobility predicts both macroeconomic contractions and household poverty during COVID-19
Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 17
Release: 2021-02-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

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Amid extreme uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic, economic policymakers have struggled to respond to rapidly changing circumstances with appropriate speed and scale. One policy obstacle is the dearth of real-time indicators of the pandemic’s economic impacts, especially in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Here we show that an ‘immobility’ indicator from GoogleTM – measuring the extent to which consumers are staying at home more – is a powerful predictor of changes in household poverty in Myanmar, as well as aggregate national consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) in cross-country data. Combined, this evidence suggests that real-time mobility indicators have the potential to inform a wide range of policy deliberations, including forecasting models, fine-tuning the timing of both economic stimulus and social protection interventions, and tracking economic recovery from this unprecedented crisis.

Testing Prediction Performance of Poverty Models

Testing Prediction Performance of Poverty Models
Author: Astrid Mathiassen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

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This paper examines the performance of a method of predicting poverty rates. Because most developing countries cannot justify the expense of frequent household budget surveys, additional low-cost methods have been developed and used. The prediction method is based on a model linking the proportion of poor households to suitable explanatory variables (consumption proxies). These consumption proxies are variables that can be collected at much lower cost through smaller annual surveys. Several applications have shown that such models can produce poverty estimates with confidence intervals of a similar magnitude to the poverty estimates from the household budget surveys. There is, however, limited evidence of how well the methods perform out-of-sample. A series of seven household budget surveys conducted in Uganda in the period 1993-2005 allows us to test the prediction performance of the model. We test the poverty models by using data from one survey to predict the proportion of poor households in other surveys, and vice versa. The results are encouraging, as all models predict similar poverty trends. Although in most cases the predictions are precise, sometimes they differ significantly from the poverty level estimated from the survey directly.

Predicting Poverty with Missing Incomes

Predicting Poverty with Missing Incomes
Author: Paolo Verme
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN:

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Poverty prediction models are used by economists to address missing data issues in a variety of contexts such as poverty profiling, targeting with proxy-means tests, cross-survey imputations such as poverty mapping, or vulnerability analyses. Based on the models used by this literature, this paper conducts an experiment by artificially corrupting data with different patterns and shares of missing incomes. It then compares the capacity of classic econometric and machine learning models to predict poverty under these different scenarios. It finds that the quality of predictions and the choice of the optimal prediction model are dependent on the distribution of observed and unobserved incomes, the poverty line, the choice of objective function and policy preferences, and various other modeling choices. Logistic and random forest models are found to be more robust than other models to variations in these features, but no model invariably outperforms all others. The paper concludes with some reflections on the use of these models for predicting poverty.

Poverty Prediction and Targeting Over Time and Space

Poverty Prediction and Targeting Over Time and Space
Author: Marup Hossain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

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Understanding poverty dynamics is crucial to target and tailor economic policies in developing countries like Nigeria - a country at the risk of hosting about a quarter of all people living in poverty worldwide. To facilitate the targeting of poverty-reducing interventions, we build a nationally representative panel dataset with more than a hundred covariates and apply econometric and machine learning tools to predict and examine factors associated with static, transient, and persistent poverty status of Nigerian households. Results show that demographic, asset holdings, access to infrastructure, and housing indicators can predict poverty accurately in 80% of cases.

Small Area Estimation-Based Prediction Methods to Track Poverty

Small Area Estimation-Based Prediction Methods to Track Poverty
Author: Luc Christiaensen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Price deflators are also often missing or disputed. In response, poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been developed. These methods typically assume that the estimated relation between consumption and its predictors is stable over time -- an assumption that cannot usually be tested directly. This study analyzes the performance of poverty prediction models based on small area estimation techniques. Predicted poverty estimates are compared with directly observed levels in two country settings where data comparability over time is not a problem. Prediction models that employ either non-staple food or non-food expenditures or a full set of assets as predictors are found to yield poverty estimates that match observed poverty well. This offers some support to the use of such methods to approximate the evolution of poverty. Two further country examples illustrate how an application of the method employing models based on household assets can help to adjudicate between alternative price deflators.

Predicting Poverty

Predicting Poverty
Author: John Fisher
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1995
Genre:
ISBN:

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