Using Principal Component Analysis to Identify Priority Neighbourhoods for Health Services Delivery by Ranking Socioeconomic Status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives. Changes to the Canadian Census in 2010 led to the creation of the National Household Survey (NHS). The voluntary nature of the NHS has important implications to health research in Canada, as the validity of its data used for socioeconomic status (SES) index creation, especially income variables, is questionable. This study sought to determine the appropriateness of replacing census income information with tax filer data to produce SES neighbourhood indices.Methods. Census and taxfiler data for Guelph, Ontario were retrieved for the years 2005, 2006, and 2011. Data were extracted for eleven income and non-income SES variables. Principal component analysis was utilized to identify significant principal components from each dataset and weights of each contributing variable. Variable-specific factor scores were applied to standardized census and taxfiler data values to produce SES scores.Results. The substitution of taxfiler income variables for census income variables yielded SES score distributions and neighbourhood SES classifications that were similar to SES scores calculated using entirely census variables. Combining taxfiler income variables with census non-income variables also produced clearer SES level distinctions.Conclusion. Identifying socioeconomic disparities between neighbourhoods is an important step in assessing the level of disadvantage of communities, and the presented method can be adapted to other locales for such a purpose. The ability to replace census income information with taxfiler data to develop SES indices will increase the versatility of public health research and planning in Canada, and contribute to the improvement of SES measurement and calculation methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".