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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">IJPDS</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>International Journal of Population Data Science</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title>IJPDS</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2399-4908</issn>
<publisher>
<publisher-name>Swansea University</publisher-name>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.23889/ijpds.v11i5.3752</article-id>
<article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">11:5:3752</article-id>
<article-id pub-id-type="pii">S2399490821037526</article-id>
<article-categories>
<subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
<subject>Population Data Science</subject>
</subj-group>
</article-categories>
<title-group>
<article-title>Describing multidimensional life course sequences capturing a child’s context using vector embeddings</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group>
<contrib contrib-type="author"><name><surname>Reichert</surname><given-names initials="M">Maximilian</given-names></name><xref ref-type="aff" rid="affil-1"><sup>1</sup></xref></contrib>
<aff id="affil-1"><label>1</label><institution>Erasmus Universitz, Rotterdam, Netherlands</institution></aff>
</contrib-group>
<pub-date date-type="pub" publication-format="electronic"><day></day><month></month><year></year></pub-date>
<pub-date date-type="collection" publication-format="electronic"><year></year></pub-date>
<volume>11</volume>
<issue>5</issue>
<elocation-id>3752</elocation-id>
<permissions>
<license license-type="open-access" xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">
<license-p>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.</license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://ijpds.org/article/view/3752">This article is available from the IJPDS website at: https://ijpds.org/article/view/3752</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The early years of childhood are among the most formative of a person’s life. In this study I ask: what typical composition of contextual resources characterises the early years of a child’s life? I set out to describe the contextual resources of a Dutch cohort of children born in 2013 over the course of the first 12 years using tools from natural language processing. I construct a wide variety of indicators covering several contextual life course domains, such as parental income, wealth, residential mobility, and family configurations using Dutch register data. I apply a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network, to encode these multi-domain sequences into two sets of vector embeddings for each child: First, one global vector embedding representing the entire person-sequence. Second, eleven yearly embeddings representing one person-year from 1 to 12 each. I cluster the life course sequences using the global vector embeddings and then describe the clusters. Additionally, I use the yearly embeddings to measure life course instability in contextual resources by tracing relative movement through the vector space over time. I then correlate these clusters and instability measures with parental sociodemographic circumstances measured before birth and/or children’s outcomes in adolescence.</p>
</abstract>
</article-meta>
</front>
</article>