Using Machine Learning to Predict Poverty Status in Costa Rican Households

Abstract: This study presents two supervised multiclassification machine learning models to predict the poverty status of Costa Rican households as a way to support government and business sectors make decisions in a rapidly changing social and economic environment. Using the Costa Rican household dataset collected via the proxy means test conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank, Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Trees achieved F1 scores of 64.9% and 68.4%, respectively. This study also reveals that education has the greatest impact on predicting poverty status.