News Finding: These villages were considered worse off than those with more metal roofs.
Paper Finding: In principle, our model can make predictions at any resolution for which daytime satellite imagery is available, though predictions on finer scales would likely be noisier.
News Context: It's probably best not to rely solely on satellite data, experts say. These villages were considered worse off than those with more metal roofs. But people figured it out.
Paper Context: Although our model outperforms other sources of passively collected data (e.g., cellphone data, nightlights) in estimating economic well-being at the cluster level, we are currently unable to assess its ability to discern differences within clusters, as public-domain survey data assign identical coordinates to all households in a given cluster to preserve respondent privacy. In principle, our model can make predictions at any resolution for which daytime satellite imagery is available, though predictions on finer scales would likely be noisier. New sources of ground truth data, whether from more disaggregated surveys or novel crowdsourced channels, could enable evaluation of our model at the household level.