Urban mapping in Dar es Salaam using Angle-Based Joint and Individual Variation Explained

Rachel J. Carrington, Ian L. Dryden, Madeleine Ellis, James O. Goulding, Simon P. Preston, David J. Sirl

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Mapping deprivation in urban areas is important, for example for identifying areas of greatest need and planning interventions. Traditional ways of obtaining deprivation estimates are based on either census or household survey data, which in many areas is unavailable or difficult to collect. However, there has been a huge rise in the amount of new, non-traditional forms of data, such as satellite imagery and cell-phone call-record data, which may contain information useful for identifying deprivation. We use Angle-Based Joint and Individual Variation Explained (AJIVE) to jointly model satellite imagery data, cell-phone data, and survey data for the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We first identify interpretable low-dimensional structure from the imagery and cell-phone data, and find that we can use these to identify deprivation. We then consider what is gained from further incorporating the more traditional and costly survey data. We also introduce a scalar measure of deprivation as a response variable to be predicted, and consider various approaches to multiview regression, including using AJIVE scores as predictors.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)247-269
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C - Applied Statistics
Volume75
Issue number1
Early online date18 Aug 2025
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Jan 2026

Data Availability Statement

The image data used as part of this study is freely available online; see Section 2.2 for details. The CDR data, which was provided to us through a partnership with a mobile network operator, cannot be shared for reasons of individual and commercial privacy, but the list of variables used can be found in the online supplementary material. The authors have made public the code used for this analysis, which can be viewed and downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/rachelcarrington/ajive-dar-es-salaam.

Funding

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant reference EP/T003928/1].

FundersFunder number
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilEP/T003928/1

Keywords

  • dimension reduction
  • multiview data
  • urban mapping

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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