Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities.

The availability of reliable socioeconomic data is critical for the design of urban policies and the implementation of location-based services; however, often, their temporal and geographical coverage remain scarce. We explore the potential for insurance customers data to predict socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities. First, we define a features space by aggregating at city-level individual customer data along several behavioral and user profile dimensions. Second, we collect official statistics shared by the Swiss authorities on a wide spectrum of categories: Population, Transportation, Work, Space and Territory, Housing, and Economy. Third, we adopt two spatial regression models exploring both global and local geographical dependencies to investigate their predictability. Results show consistently a correlation between insurance customer characteristics and official socioeconomic indexes. Performance fluctuates depending on the category, with values of R2 > 0.6 for several target variables using a 5-fold cross validation. As a case study, we focus on predicting the percentage of the population using public transportation and we discuss the implications on a regional scope. We believe that this methodology can support official statistical offices and it could open up new opportunities for the characterization of socioeconomic traits at highly-granular spatial and temporal scales.

Dataset of measured and commented pantograph electric arcs in DC railways.

DC railways are characterized by particularly intense arcing caused by pantograph detachment, due to the large current intensity and the general implementation of onboard resonant filters, whose transient response is triggered by electric transients including electric arcs. Electric arc depends on the train speed (the relative speed between the sliding contact over the pantograph and the hot spot on the catenary system), the intensity of the collected pantograph current and the line voltage level. Electric arcs are broadband in nature and can trigger the system transient response dominated by the resonant filter, besides interfering with the operation of onboard equipment (such as for energy conversion and metering).