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research article

Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities

Donadio, Lorenzo
•
Schifanella, Rossano
•
Binder, Claudia R.  
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March 3, 2021
PLOS One

The availability of reliable socioeconomic data is critical for the design of urban policies and the implementation of location-based services; however, often, their temporal and geographical coverage remain scarce. We explore the potential for insurance customers data to predict socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities. First, we define a features space by aggregating at city-level individual customer data along several behavioral and user profile dimensions. Second, we collect official statistics shared by the Swiss authorities on a wide spectrum of categories: Population, Transportation, Work, Space and Territory, Housing, and Economy. Third, we adopt two spatial regression models exploring both global and local geographical dependencies to investigate their predictability. Results show consistently a correlation between insurance customer characteristics and official socioeconomic indexes. Performance fluctuates depending on the category, with values of R2 > 0.6 for several target variables using a 5-fold cross validation. As a case study, we focus on predicting the percentage of the population using public transportation and we discuss the implications on a regional scope. We believe that this methodology can support official statistical offices and it could open up new opportunities for the characterization of socioeconomic traits at highly-granular spatial and temporal scales.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0246785
Author(s)
Donadio, Lorenzo
Schifanella, Rossano
Binder, Claudia R.  
Massaro, Emanuele  
Date Issued

2021-03-03

Published in
PLOS One
Volume

16

Issue

3

Article Number

e0246785

Note

This is an Open Access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HERUS  
Available on Infoscience
March 11, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/175880
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