Georeferenced Program Evaluation

 

Georeferenced Program Evaluation (GPE)

Project led by urbanist data scientist Antonio Vasquez Brust, and described in detail in the IDB’s blog Behind the scenes: Big Data analysis for public policy (also available in Spanish).

The GPE (Georeferenced Program Evaluation) R package includes functions that will allow the user to study various aspects of consumer or beneficiary behavior, including:

  • Georeference postal addresses (converting street name and number to latitude and longitude points)

  • Obtain base maps of any city’s urban grid and visualize overlaid projections of the distance traveled (between participants’ homes and points of service accessed, for example)

  • Estimate a matrix of distances between sites accessed and consumer/beneficiary origin

  • Calculate metrics of frequency, distribution by group, and distance travelled by consumers/beneficiaries to points of sale/access

  • Create visualizations that explore the difference between frequency and type of consumption by consumer/beneficiary attribute (depending on the information available: socioeconomic status, length of program participation, type of program participation, etc)

Full code, description and installation instructions can be found here.