Abstract

In this paper, we propose and validate with data extracted from the city of Santiago, capital of Chile, a methodology to assess the actual impact of lockdown measures based on the anonymized and geolocated data from credit card transactions. Using unsupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) semantic topic discovery, we identify temporal patterns in the use of credit cards that allow us to quantitatively assess the changes in the behavior of the people under the lockdown measures because of the COVID-19 pandemic. An unsupervised latent topic analysis uncovers the main patterns of credit card transaction activity that explain the behavior of the inhabitants of Santiago City. The approach is non-intrusive because it does not require the collaboration of people for providing the anonymous data. It does not interfere with the actual behavior of the people in the city; hence, it does not introduce any bias. We identify a strong downturn of the economic activity as measured by credit card transactions (down to 70%), and thus of the economic activity, in city sections (communes) that were subjected to lockdown versus communes without lockdown. This change in behavior is confirmed by independent data from mobile phone connectivity. The reduction of activity emerges before the actual lockdowns were enforced, suggesting that the population was spontaneously implementing the required measures for slowing virus propagation.