Estimation of Socioeconomic Attributes from Location Information

Abstract

Timely estimation of the distribution of socioeconomic attributes and their movement is crucial for academic as well as administrative and marketing purposes. During the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, it has been revealed that collecting information on where elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus, are and how the young, who are susceptible to transmitting it, move is valuable to find routes and potential clusters of infection. In this study, assuming personal attributes affect human behavior and movement, we predict these attributes from location information. First, we predict the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals by supervised learning methods, i.e., logistic Lasso regression, Gaussian Naive Bayes, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and support vector machine, using survey data we collected of personal attributes and frequency of visits to specific facilities, to test our conjecture. We find that gender, a crucial attribute, is as highly predictable from locations as from other sources such as social networking services, as done by existing studies. Second, we apply the model trained with the survey data to actual GPS log data to check the performance of our approach in a real-world setting. Though our approach does not perform as well as for the survey data, the results suggest that we can infer gender from a GPS log.