Abstract
Census data provide detailed information about population characteristics at a coarse resolution. Nevertheless, fine-grained, high-resolution mappings of population counts are increasingly needed to characterize population dynamics and to assess the consequences of climate shocks, natural disasters, investments in infrastructure, development policies, etc. Disaggregating these census is a complex machine learning, and multiple solutions have been proposed in past research. We propose in this paper to view the problem in the context of the aggregate learning paradigm, where the output value for all training points is not known, but where it is only known for aggregates of the points (i.e. in this context, for regions of pixels where a census is available). We demonstrate with a very simple and interpretable model that this method is on par, and even outperforms on some metrics, the state-of-the-art, despite its simplicity.
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Acknowledgments
Computational resources have been provided by the supercomputing facilities of the Université catholique de Louvain (CISM/UCL) and the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif en Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (CÉCI) funded by the Fond de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS) under convention 2.5020.11. We would like to thank Pavel Demin and the CP3 group that shared with us part of their reserved resources. The second and third authors acknowledge financial support from the ARC convention on “New approaches to understanding and modeling global migration trends” (convention 18/23-091).
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Derval, G., Docquier, F., Schaus, P. (2020). An Aggregate Learning Approach for Interpretable Semi-supervised Population Prediction and Disaggregation Using Ancillary Data. In: Brefeld, U., Fromont, E., Hotho, A., Knobbe, A., Maathuis, M., Robardet, C. (eds) Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11908. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46133-1_40
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