Using GIS-based methods of multicriteria analysis to construct socio-economic deprivation indices
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Over the past several decades researchers have produced substantial evidence of a social gradient in a variety of health outcomes, rising from systematic differences in income, education, employment conditions, and family dynamics within the population. Social gradients in health are measured using deprivation indices, which are typically constructed from aggregated socio-economic data taken from the national census--a technique which dates back at least until the early 1970's. The primary method of index construction over the last decade has been a Principal Component Analysis. Seldom are the indices constructed from survey-based data sources due to the inherent difficulty in validating the subjectivity of the response scores. We argue that this very subjectivity can uncover spatial distributions of local health outcomes. Moreover, indication of neighbourhood socio-economic status may go underrepresented when weighted without expert opinion. In this paper we propose the use of geographic information science (GIS) for constructing the index. We employ a GIS-based Order Weighted Average (OWA) Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) as a technique to validate deprivation indices that are constructed using more qualitative data sources. Both OWA and traditional MCA are well known and used methodologies in spatial analysis but have had little application in social epidemiology. RESULTS: A survey of British Columbia's Medical Health Officers (MHOs) was used to populate the MCA-based index. Seven variables were selected and weighted based on the survey results. OWA variable weights assign both local and global weights to the index variables using a sliding scale, producing a range of variable scenarios. The local weights also provide leverage for controlling the level of uncertainty in the MHO response scores. This is distinct from traditional deprivation indices in that the weighting is simultaneously dictated by the original respondent scores and the value of the variables in the dataset. CONCLUSION: OWA-based MCA is a sensitive instrument that permits incorporation of expert opinion in quantifying socio-economic gradients in health status. OWA applies both subjective and objective weights to the index variables, thus providing a more rational means of incorporating survey results into spatial analysis.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it