Mobility and sociocultural events in mobile phone data records

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ponieman, Nicolas B.^a | Sarraute, Carlos^{a; *} | Minnoni, Martin^a | Travizano, Matias^a | Rodriguez Zivic, Pablo^b | Salles, Alejo^{c; d; e}

Affiliations: [a] Grandata Labs, Buenos Aires, Argentina. E-mails: nico@grandata.com, charles@grandata.com, martin@grandata.com, mat@grandata.com | [b] Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. E-mail: prodriguez@dc.uba.ar | [c] Physics Department, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. E-mail: alejo@df.uba.ar | [d] Instituto de Cálculo, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina | [e] CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Carlos Sarraute, Grandata Labs, Buenos Aires, Argentina. E-mail: charles@grandata.com.

Abstract: The massive amounts of geolocation data collected from mobile phone records have sparked an ongoing effort to understand and predict the mobility patterns of human beings. In this work, we study the extent to which social phenomena are reflected in mobile phone data, providing some proof-of-principle examples. We illustrate in various ways how these events are reflected in the data, and show how information about the events can be used to improve predictability in a simple model for a mobile phone user’s location. We further propose a method for the automatic detection of such events and discuss their relation to the social fabric as derived from mobile phone communications.

Keywords: Human mobility, human predictability, social phenomena

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-150687

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 77-86, 2016