_DESMIGRATIF_ program in areas with higher migrant concentrations, which tend to be more rural.<sup>3</sup> The sample includes 13,318 households, with an average of 43 households per village.

The survey is conducted in two parts. A first questionnaire is administered to the most knowledgeable individual regarding household affairs. This questionnaire covers a roster of household members with basic demographic, education, and employment participation questions; household agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises, assets (including home conditions, e.g. material used for walls of the residence), access to savings and loans, receipts of social assistance programs, economic shocks; and proxy questions about current and return migrants’ migration experiences (henceforth, referred to as the “household survey”). The second part of this survey randomly selects one eligible individual aged between 18 to 40 in each household to be interviewed in more details (henceforth, referred to as the “individual survey”).<sup>4</sup> It complements the education and employment information from the household survey, with additional questions covering literacy skills (in national and foreign languages), job search, and hours of work. It also includes detailed questions on interest to migrate, intended occupation and destination country, personal migration experience, social network pertaining to other migrants, interactions with migrant brokers, expectations of salaries, costs, and work conditions in destination countries, and perceptions of risks and returns from migration. We use most of the questions in the household and individual surveys combined, and we either include the questions as-is, recode them as dummy indicators, or define new variables from multiple questions.<sup>5</sup> We take a broad view of what can be a potential determinant for migration to explore other potential determinants that have not been established in prior literature or that are not commonly collected in other surveys, such as individual perceptions of success and means to achieve success. We use virtually all variables collected in the survey.<sup>6</sup> We end up with 301 continuous or binary potential determinants that will be fed in as inputs to the ML algorithms. The full list of potential determinant variables used in our analysis is presented in Appendix Table 1.

Our sample is composed of 5,131 men and 8,187 women. The individuals here are what we consider as “potential migrants”. Due to the random selection of an individual within the household, the

> 3 Of the households in our survey, 96.1 percent reside in rural areas, compared to only 44 percent of households residing in rural areas in a recent nationally representative socioeconomic survey (SUSENAS 20192020).

> 4 Ideally, each household should have a corresponding individual representative. However, in practice, the household and individual surveys have to be conducted on two separate occasions due to the length of the survey. There are a few attritions (0.1 percent), where the randomly selected individual cannot be followedup. Since the interest to migrate question is asked in the individual (not household) survey, we can only use the balanced sample with both household and individual surveys completed (N = 13,318).

> 5 Each category of categorical variables is recoded as separate binary variables.

> 6 We exclude irrelevant questions or questions with no interpretable meaning for our analysis. This includes questions such as the time and day of the interview.

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