Machine and deep learning advances have come to permeate modern sciences and have unlocked the study of numerous issues many deemed intractable. Social sciences have accordingly not been exempted from benefiting from these advances, as neural language model have been extensively used to analyze social and linguistic based phenomena such as the quantification of semantic change or the detection of the ideological bias of news articles, while convolutional neural networks have been used in urban settings to explore the dynamics of urban change by determining which characteristics predict neighborhood improvement or by examining how the perception of safety affects the liveliness of neighborhoods.
In light of this fact, this dissertation argues that one particular social phenomenon, socioeconomic inequalities, can be gainfully studied by means of the above. We set out to collect and combine large datasets enabling 1) the study of the spatial, temporal, linguistic and network dependencies of socioeconomic inequalities and 2) the inference of socioeconomic status (SES) from these multimodal signals. This task is one worthy of study as previous research endeavors have come short of providing a complete picture on how these multiple factors are intertwined with individual socioeconomic status and how the former can fuel better inference methodologies for the latter. The study of these questions is important, as much is still unclear about the root causes of SES inequalities and the deployment of ML/DL solutions to pinpoint them is still very much in its infancy.
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