Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities

Lorenzo Donadio, Rossano Schifanella, Claudia R Binder and Emanuele Massaro

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 3, 1-23

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0246785

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246785

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