Rapid indicators of deprivation using grocery shopping data

Measuring socio-economic indicators is a crucial task for policy makers who need to develop and implement policies aimed at reducing inequalities and improving the quality of life. However, traditionally this is a time-consuming and expensive task, which therefore cannot be carried out with high temporal frequency. Here, we investigate whether secondary data generated from our grocery shopping habits can be used to generate rapid estimates of deprivation in the city of London in the UK. We show the existence of a relationship between our grocery shopping data and the deprivation of different areas in London, and how we can use grocery shopping data to generate quick estimates of deprivation, albeit with some limitations. Crucially, our estimates can be generated very rapidly with the data used in our analysis, thus opening up the opportunity of having early access to estimates of deprivation. Our findings provide further evidence that new data streams contain accurate information about our collective behaviour and the current state of our society.