# Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Modeling Socio-Economic Dynamics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00632 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00632/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08926/) (2020)
- [On Neural Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02435/) (2022)
- [Gate-Variants of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05923/) (2017)
- [Comprehensive Review of Neural Differential Equations for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09885/) (2025)
- [Bayesian Recurrent Neural Network Models for Forecasting and Quantifying Uncertainty in Spatial-Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00636/) (2017)
- [Short-term Prediction of Household Electricity Consumption Using Customized LSTM and GRU Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08757/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Poverty is a complex dynamic challenge that cannot be adequately captured using predefined differential equations. Nowadays, artificial machine learning (ML) methods have demonstrated significant potential in modelling real-world dynamical systems. Among these, Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) have emerged as a powerful, data-driven approach for learning continuous-time dynamics directly from observations. This chapter applies the Neural ODE framework to analyze poverty dynamics in the Indian state of Odisha. Specifically, we utilize time-series data from 2007 to 2020 on the key indicators of economic development and poverty reduction. Within the Neural ODE architecture, the temporal gradient of the system is represented by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The obtained neural dynamical system is integrated using a numerical ODE solver to obtain the trajectory of over time. In backpropagation, the adjoint sensitivity method is utilized for gradient computation during training to facilitate effective backpropagation through the ODE solver. The trained Neural ODE model reproduces the observed data with high accuracy. This demonstrates the capability of Neural ODE to capture the dynamics of the poverty indicator of concrete-structured households. The obtained results show that ML methods, such as Neural ODEs, can serve as effective tools for modeling socioeconomic transitions. It can provide policymakers with reliable projections, supporting more informed and effective decision-making for poverty alleviation.