FIMS: Identifying, Predicting and Visualising Food Insecurity

Lucas, Benjamin; Smith, Andrew; Smith, Gavin; Perrat, Bertrand; Nica-Avram, Georgiana; Harvey, John; Goulding, James

Abstract

Food insecurity is a persistent and pernicious problem in the UK. Due to logistical challenges, national food insecurity statistics are unmeasured by government bodies - and this lack of data leads to any local estimates that do exist being routinely questioned by policymakers. We demonstrate a data-driven approach to address this issue, deriving national estimates of food insecurity via combination of supervised machine learning with network analysis of user behaviour, extracted from the world's most popular peer-to-peer food sharing application (OLIO). Despite long-standing theoretical links between social graph topologies and physical neighbourhoods, prior research has not considered dimensions of geography, network interactions and behaviours in the digital/analogue space simultaneously. In addressing this oversight, we produce a browser-based, interactive and rapidly updateable visualisation, which can be used to analyse the spatial distribution of food insecurity across the UK, and provide new perspective for policy research.

Citation

Lucas, B., Smith, A., Smith, G., Perrat, B., Nica-Avram, G., Harvey, J., & Goulding, J. (2020). FIMS: Identifying, Predicting and Visualising Food Insecurity. In WWW '20: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020 (190-193). https://doi.org/10.1145/3366424.3383538

• Conference Name: The Web Conference 2020 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2020
• Conference Location: Taipei Taiwan
• Start Date: Apr 20, 2020
• End Date: Apr 24, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Mar 1, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Apr 1, 2020
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 8, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 31, 2020
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 190-193
• Book Title: WWW '20: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020
• ISBN: 9781450370240
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3366424.3383538
• Keywords: CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Machine learning approaches; • Applied computing → Sociology; • Human-centered com- puting → Geographic visualization KEYWORDS Food Insecurity, Hunger, Poverty, Geospatial, Data, Visualization, Computat
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4607565
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3366424.3383538