Title
Optimal Proxy Selection for Socioeconomic Status Inference on Twitter.
Abstract
Individual socioeconomic status inference from online traces is a remarkably difficult task. While current methods commonly train predictive models on incomplete data by appending socioeconomic information of residential areas or professional occupation profiles, little attention has been paid to how well this information serves as a proxy for the individual demographic trait of interest when fed to a learning model. Here we address this question by proposing three different data collection and combination methods to first estimate and, in turn, infer the socioeconomic status of French Twitter users from their online semantics. We assess the validity of each proxy measure by analyzing the performance of our prediction pipeline when trained on these datasets. Despite having to rely on different user sets, we find that training our model on professional occupation provides better predictive performance than open census data or remote sensed expert annotation of habitual environments. Furthermore, we release the tools we developed in the hope it will provide a generalizable framework to estimate socioeconomic status of large numbers of Twitter users as well as contribute to the scientific discussion on social stratification and inequalities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1155/2019/6059673
COMPLEXITY
Field
DocType
Volume
Data science,Proxy (climate),Data collection,Annotation,Trait,Inference,Social stratification,Artificial intelligence,Semantics,Machine learning,Mathematics,Socioeconomic status
Journal
2019
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1076-2787
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jacob Levy Abitbol112.05
Eric Fleury224323.71
Márton Karsai342230.42