Poverty maps are essential tools for governments and NGOs to track
socioeconomic changes and adequately allocate infrastructure and services in
places in need. Sensor and online crowd-sourced data combined with machine
learning methods have provided a recent breakthrough in poverty map inference.
However, these methods do not capture local wealth fluctuations, and are not
optimized to produce accountable results that guarantee accurate predictions to
all sub-populations. Here, we propose a pipeline of machine learning models to
infer the mean and standard deviation of wealth across multiple geographically
clustered populated places, and illustrate their performance in Sierra Leone
and Uganda. These models leverage seven independent and freely available
feature sources based on satellite images, and metadata collected via online
crowd-sourcing and social media. Our models show that combined metadata
features are the best predictors of wealth in rural areas, outperforming
image-based models, which are the best for predicting the highest wealth
quintiles. Our results recover the local mean and variation of wealth, and
correctly capture the positive yet non-monotonous correlation between them. We
further demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of model transfer across
countries and the effects of data recency and other biases. Our methodology
provides open tools to build towards more transparent and interpretable models
to help governments and NGOs to make informed decisions based on data
availability, urbanization level, and poverty thresholds.

该研究利用卫星图像和在线群众采集与社交媒体数据，运用机器学习方法，建立了可预测多个具有地理聚集特征的人口聚居地财富平均数和标准差的模型，并在塞拉利昂和乌干达进行了验证和性能比较，揭示元数据对农村区域财富预测有更好的表现。该方法不仅能恢复本地财富的平均数和变异性，还能捕捉它们之间的正相关性，具有一定的可迁移性和可解释性。