Predicting Poverty

Abstract Poverty prediction models are used to address missing data issues in a variety of contexts such as poverty profiling, targeting with proxy-means tests, cross-survey imputations such as poverty mapping, top and bottom income studies, or vulnerability analyses. Based on the models used by this literature, this paper conducts a study by artificially corrupting data clear of missing incomes with different patterns and shares of missing incomes. It then compares the capacity of classic econometric and machine-learning models to predict poverty under different scenarios with full information on observed and unobserved incomes, and the true counterfactual poverty rate. Random forest provides more consistent and accurate predictions under most but not all scenarios.