Poverty Estimation Using a ConvLSTM-Based Model With Multisource Remote Sensing Data: A Case Study in Nigeria

Poverty is a global challenge, the effects of which are felt on the individual to national scale. To develop effective support policies to reduce poverty, local governments require precise poverty distribution data, which are lacking in many areas. In this study, we proposed a model to estimate poverty on a spatial scale of 10 x 10 km by combining features extracted from multiple data sources, including nighttime light remote sensing data, normalized difference vegetation index, surface reflectance, land cover type, and slope data, and applied the model to Nigeria. Considering that the trends of environmental factors contain valid information related to poverty, time-series features were extracted through convolutional long short-term memory and used for the assessment. The poverty level is represented by the wealth index derived from the Demographic and Health Survey Program. The model exhibited good ability to estimate poverty, with an R-2 of 0.73 between the actual and estimated wealth index in Nigeria in 2018. Applying the proposed model to poverty estimation for Nigeria in 2021 yielded an R-2 value of 0.69, indicating good generalization ability. To further validate model reliability, we compared the assessment results with high-resolution satellite imagery and a state-level multidimensional poverty index. We also investigated the impact of incorporating time-series features on the accuracy of poverty assessment. Results showed that the addition of time-series features increased the accuracy of poverty estimation from 0.64 to 0.73. The proposed method has valuable applications for estimating poverty at the grid scale in countries without such data.