Gibin, Maurizio;
van Dijk, Justin;
Ye, Zi;
Longley, Paul;
(2025)
From names to numbers: Modelling age and gender profiles from consumer data.
Information Geography
, 1
(2)
, Article 100023. 10.1016/j.infgeo.2025.100023.
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Abstract
It is axiomatic to Information Geography that, wherever possible, data about human subjects should be created and maintained at the level of the individual. This paper develops and evaluates an innovative approach to inferring the ages of individuals from their given and family names. We use a major UK consumer lifestyles survey alongside baby name statistics to establish the age distributions associated with a comprehensive range of given names. We also use the mix of adult given names within different types of households to refine our age estimates for specific individuals. We evaluate the accuracy of these estimation techniques with respect to (a) specific respondents to a lifestyles survey and (b) UK Census small area estimates. We describe how this approach can be used to ascertain the representativeness of new sources of data and suggest further ways in which the methods might be refined using other contextual information.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | From names to numbers: Modelling age and gender profiles from consumer data |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.infgeo.2025.100023 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infgeo.2025.100023 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Nanjing Normal University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Age demographics, Consumer registers, UK census of population, Lifestyles survey, Baby names |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216463 |
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