Geospatial Foundation Models Capture Health-Relevant Dimensions of Place Beyond Conventional Social Risk Indices
Area-based social risk indices summarize residents' socioeconomic conditions but incompletely capture physical features of place that may affect health. We evaluated whether numerical representations of physical place produced by four geospatial foundation model families from 2022 satellite data explained residual variance in tract-level associations between the Area Deprivation Index, Social Deprivation Index, and Social Vulnerability Index with health outcomes. We used LightGBM to predict variables from the American Community Survey and 40 chronic disease and health-behavior outcomes from CDC PLACES across 82,646 census tracts in the contiguous United States, evaluating performance acro...
| Authors | Nathaniel Hendrix, Carl Y. Zhang, Chris Heitzig et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | stat.AP |
| Published | 10 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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