Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa

This repository includes the code and data necessary to reproduce the results and figures for the article "Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa" published in Nature Communications on May 22, 2020 (link).

Please cite this article as follows, or use the BibTeX entry below.

Yeh, C., Perez, A., Driscoll, A. et al. Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa. Nat Commun 11, 2583 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16185-w

@article{yeh2020using,
    author = {Yeh, Christopher and Perez, Anthony and Driscoll, Anne and Azzari, George and Tang, Zhongyi and Lobell, David and Ermon, Stefano and Burke, Marshall},
    day = {22},
    doi = {10.1038/s41467-020-16185-w},
    issn = {2041-1723},
    journal = {Nature Communications},
    month = {5},
    number = {1},
    title = {{Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa}},
    url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16185-w},
    volume = {11},
    year = {2020}
}

Hardware and Software Requirements

This code was tested on a system with the following specifications:

• operating system: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
• CPU: Intel Xeon Silver 4110
• memory (RAM): 125GB
• disk storage: 500GB
• GPU: 1x NVIDIA Titan Xp

The main software requirements are Python 3.7 with TensorFlow r1.15, and R 3.6. The complete list of required packages and library are listed in the env.yml file, which is meant to be used with conda (version 4.8.3). See here for instructions on installing conda via Miniconda. Once conda is installed, run the following command to set up the conda environment:

conda env create -f env.yml

If you are using a GPU, you may need to also install CUDA 10 and cuDNN 7.

Data Preparation Instructions

1. Export satellite images from Google Earth Engine. Follow the instructions in the download/export_ee_images.ipynb notebook.
2. Process the satellite images. Follow the instructions in the preprocessing/process_tfrecords_dhs.ipynb and preprocessing/process_tfrecords_lsms.ipynb notebooks. Then run the preprocessing/analyze_tfrecords_dhs.ipynb and preprocessing/analyze_tfrecords_lsms.ipynb notebooks.
3. Prepare the data files. Follow the instructions in the data_analysis/dhs.ipynb and data_analysis/lsms.ipynb notebooks.

Model Training Instructions

1. Run the baseline linear models. Follow the instructions in models/dhs_baselines.ipynb, models/lsms_baselines.ipynb, , and models/lsmsdelta_baselines.ipynb.
2. Train the convolutional neural network models. If running this code on a SLURM-enabled computing cluster, run the scripts train_directly_runner.py and train_directly_lsm_runner.py. Otherwise, run train_directly.py and train_delta.py with the desired command-line arguments to set hyperparameters.
3. Extract learned feature representations. Run the scripts extract_features_dhs.py and extract_features_lsmsdelta.py.
4. Run cross-validated ridge-regression. Follow the instructions in models/dhs_ridge_resnet.ipynb and model_analysis/lsmsdelta_resnet.ipynb.

To reproduce figs:

All necessary scripts should be in code_figs, and all necessary data should be in data. We included data of the summary stats for plotting, since the full microdata cannot be released. A few changes have been made to data and code to fix errors in plots. Code has been updated to fix an artificially inflated revisit rate for DigitalGlobe in Figure 1. Changes were made to the data on survey frequency used for Figure 1.

For the maximally-activating activation maps, see the model_analysis/max_activating.ipynb notebook.