Title
Interpretable Socioeconomic Status Inference From Aerial Imagery Through Urban Patterns
Abstract
Urbanization is a great challenge for modern societies, promising better access to economic opportunities, but widening socioeconomic inequalities. Accurately tracking this process as it unfolds has been challenging for traditional data collection methods, but remote sensing information offers an alternative way to gather a more complete view of these societal changes. By feeding neural networks with satellite images, the socioeconomic information associated with that area can be recovered. However, these models lack the ability to explain how visual features contained in a sample trigger a given prediction. Here, we close this gap by predicting socioeconomic status across France from aerial images and interpreting class activation mappings in terms of urban topology. We show that trained models disregard the spatial correlations existing between urban class and socioeconomic status to derive their predictions. These results pave the way to build more interpretable models, which may help to better track and understand urbanization and its consequences.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1038/s42256-020-00243-5
NATURE MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
2
11
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jacob Levy Abitbol112.05
Márton Karsai242230.42