Skip to main content
Article
Deep Learning Fusion of Satellite and Social Information to Estimate Human Migratory Flows
Transactions in GIS
  • Daniel Runfola, William & Mary
  • Heather Baier, William & Mary
  • Laura Mills
  • Maeve Naughton-Rockwell
  • Anthony Stefanidis, William & Mary
Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Applied Science
Department
Computer Science
Pub Date
9-1-2022
Publisher
Wiley
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Abstract

Human migratory decisions are driven by a wide range of factors, including economic and environmental condi-tions, conflict, and evolving social dynamics. These factors are reflected in disparate data sources, including house-hold surveys, satellite imagery, and even news and social media. Here, we present a deep learning- based data fusion technique integrating satellite and census data to estimate migratory flows from Mexico to the United States. We leverage a three-stage approach, in which we (1) construct a matrix- based representation of socioeconomic information for each municipality in Mexico, (2) implement a convolutional neural network with both satellite imagery and the constructed socioeconomic matrix, and (3) use the output vectors of information to estimate migratory flows. We find that this approach outperforms alternatives by approximately 10% (r2), suggesting multi- modal data fusion provides a valuable pathway forward for modeling migratory processes.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12953
Citation Information
Daniel Runfola, Heather Baier, Laura Mills, Maeve Naughton-Rockwell, et al.. "Deep Learning Fusion of Satellite and Social Information to Estimate Human Migratory Flows" Transactions in GIS Vol. 26 Iss. 6 (2022) p. 2495 - 2518
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/anthony-stefanidis/1/