Comparing spatial and spatio-temporal paradigms to estimate the evolution of socio-economical indicators from satellite images

In remote sensing, deep spatio-temporal models, i.e., deep learning models that estimate information based on Satellite Image Time Series obtain successful results in Land Use/Land Cover classification or change detection. Nevertheless, for socioeconomic applications such as poverty estimation, only deep spatial models have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a test-bed to compare spatial and spatio-temporal paradigms to estimate the evolution of Nighttime Light (NTL), a standard proxy for socioeconomic indicators. We applied the test-bed in the area of Zanzibar, Tanzania for 21 years. We observe that (1) both models obtain roughly equivalent performances when predicting the NTL value at a given time, but (2) the spatio-temporal model is significantly more efficient when predicting the NTL evolution.