Crowd-Sourced Geographies of Income: Using Google Maps Points of Interest as High-Frequency Proxies for Sub-Municipal Income Estimation in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

Accurate, up-to-date income data at the sub-municipal scale is essential for social policy in middle-income countries, yet in Brazil it depends on a costly decennial census whose intercensal gap recently exceeded a decade. We test whether the composition of crowd-sourced Google Maps Points of Interest (POIs) can serve as a high-frequency, low-cost proxy for household income across the 26,625 census sectors of the municipality of Sao Paulo. Using a theoretically motivated set of POI categories retrieved from Google Places, we represent each sector by its POI counts, decompose these high-dimensional, sparse features with principal component analysis (PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), and train a sweep of regression models to predict census-derived income. Under a data leakage-aware spatial validation design the best model (NMF with gradient boosting) attains a held-out R^2 of 0.65, with performance stable across feature-extraction methods. Interpretable decompositions reveal which POI types carry the income signal. These results suggest that commercial, crowd-sourced geospatial data can complement conventional income statistics during intercensal periods, and we discuss extensions toward multidimensional poverty and the capabilities framework.