Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence to Identify Key Characteristics of Deep Poverty for Each Household

The first task for eradicating poverty is accurate poverty identification. Deep poverty identification is conducive to investing resources to help deeply poor populations achieve prosperity, one of the most challenging tasks in poverty eradication. This study constructs a deep poverty identification model utilizing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to identify deeply poor households based on the data of 23,307 poor households in rural areas in China. For comparison, a logistic regression-based model and an income-based model are developed as well. We found that our XAI-based model achieves a higher identification performance in terms of the area under the ROC curve than both the logistic regression-based model and the income-based model. For each rural household, the odds of being identified as deeply poor are obtained. Additionally, multidimensional household characteristics associated with deep poverty are specified and ranked for each poor household, while ordinary feature ranking methods can only provide ranking results for poor households as a whole. Taking all poor households into consideration, we found that common important characteristics that can be used to identify deeply poor households include household income, disability, village attributes, lack of funds, labor force, disease, and number of household members, which are validated by mutual information analysis. In conclusion, our XAI-based model can be used to identify deep poverty and specify key household characteristics associated with deep poverty for individual households, facilitating the development of new targeted poverty reduction strategies.