District-Level Food Environment Indicators and Social Vulnerability in São Paulo

📅 2026-08-26
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过机器学习方法分析了圣保罗96个区的食品环境指标与社会脆弱性之间的关系,发现健康和不健康食品店密度是关键因素。
📝 Abstract
Urban food environments may reflect broader socioeconomic inequalities, but district-level evidence remains limited in Brazilian cities. This study examined whether indicators of food retail and street-market availability discriminate between levels of social vulnerability across the 96 districts of São Paulo. We conducted an exploratory cross-sectional ecological analysis integrating the São Paulo Social Vulnerability Index (IPVS), establishment records from the Relação Anual de Informações Sociais (RAIS), and street-market data from CAISAN. Census-sector information was aggregated at the district level. Twenty districts without an IPVS classification were excluded, resulting in 76 observations. The outcome distinguished districts classified as IPVS level 1 from those classified as levels 2--7. Predictors described the densities of healthy and unhealthy food establishments, the number of street markets, and the availability of establishments selling fresh or in natura food. Eight conventional machine-learning classifiers were evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation. Reported mean F-scores ranged from 0.62 to 0.75, with XGBoost obtaining the highest value. In the Random Forest model, the densities of healthy and unhealthy food establishments jointly accounted for approximately 60% of the total impurity-based feature importance. These findings indicate that publicly available food-environment indicators contain information associated with the district-level distribution of social vulnerability. However, the small ecological sample, class imbalance, outcome binarization, and cross-sectional design limit predictive generalization and preclude causal or household-level interpretations.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

food environment
social vulnerability
São Paulo
district-level
food availability
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

machine learning
food environment indicators
social vulnerability
XGBoost
Random Forest
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Pedro Lemes Sixel Lobo
Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, GO, Brazil
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Eric Tokuda
Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, SP, Brazil
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Kuruvilla Joseph Abraham
Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz da Universidade de São Paulo, USP, Piracicaba, SP, Brazil
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Roberto Fray
Faculdade de Saúde Pública, USP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
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Dirce Maria Marchioni
Faculdade de Saúde Pública, USP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
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Alexandre Cláudio Botazzo Delbem
Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, GO, Brazil
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Rogerio Salvini
Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, GO, Brazil