Estimating Socioeconomic Status via Temporal-Spatial Mobility Analysis -- A Case Study of Smart Card Data

The notion of socioeconomic status (SES) of a person or family reflects the corresponding entity's social and economic rank in society. Such information may help applications like bank loaning decisions and provide measurable inputs for related studies like social stratification, social welfare and business planning. Traditionally, estimating SES for a large population is performed by national statistical institutes through a large number of household interviews, which is highly expensive and time-consuming. Recently researchers try to estimate SES from data sources like mobile phone call records and online social network platforms, which is much cheaper and faster. Instead of relying on these data about users' cyberspace behaviors, various alternative data sources on real-world users' behavior such as mobility may offer new insights for SES estimation. In this paper, we leverage Smart Card Data (SCD) for public transport systems which records the temporal and spatial mobility behavior of a large population of users. More specifically, we develop S2S, a deep learning based approach for estimating people's SES based on their SCD. Essentially, S2S models two types of SES-related features, namely the temporal-sequential feature and general statistical feature, and leverages deep learning for SES estimation. We evaluate our approach in an actual dataset, Shanghai SCD, which involves millions of users. The proposed model clearly outperforms several state-of-art methods in terms of various evaluation metrics.