Urban Mobility: Velocity and Uncertainty in Mobile Phone Data

Computer Networks, 2014

PLoS ONE, 2014

The pervasive use of new mobile devices has allowed a better characterization in space and time of human concentrations and mobility in general. Besides its theoretical interest, describing mobility is of great importance for a number of practical applications ranging from the forecast of disease spreading to the design of new spaces in urban environments. While classical data sources, such as surveys or census, have a limited level of geographical resolution (e.g., districts, municipalities, counties are typically used) or are restricted to generic workdays or weekends, the data coming from mobile devices can be precisely located both in time and space. Most previous works have used a single data source to study human mobility patterns. Here we perform instead a cross-check analysis by comparing results obtained with data collected from three different sources: Twitter, census and cell phones. The analysis is focused on the urban areas of Barcelona and Madrid, for which data of the three types is available. We assess the correlation between the datasets on different aspects: the spatial distribution of people concentration, the temporal evolution of people density and the mobility patterns of individuals. Our results show that the three data sources are providing comparable information. Even though the representativeness of Twitter geolocated data is lower than that of mobile phone and census data, the correlations between the population density profiles and mobility patterns detected by the three datasets are close to one in a grid with cells of 2 × 2 and 1 × 1 square kilometers. This level of correlation supports the feasibility of interchanging the three data sources at the spatio-temporal scales considered.

Understanding the patterns of mobility of individuals is crucial for a number of reasons, from city planning to disaster management. There are two common ways of quantifying the amount of travel between locations: by direct observations that often involve privacy issues, e.g., tracking mobile phone locations, or by estimations from models. Typically, such models build on accurate knowledge of the population size at each location. However, when this information is not readily available, their applicability is rather limited. As mobile phones are ubiquitous, our aim is to investigate if mobility patterns can be inferred from aggregated mobile phone call data alone. Using data released by Orange for Ivory Coast, we show that human mobility is well predicted by a simple model based on the frequency of mobile phone calls between two locations and their geographical distance. We argue that the strength of the model comes from directly incorporating the social dimension of mobility. Furthermore, as only aggregated call data is required, the model helps to avoid potential privacy problems. P eople travel and move for a variety of reasons, including social, economic, and political factors. While individuals may follow simple, recurrent patterns of movement, e.g., daily commuting, a more complex picture emerges when all trajectories of a population are assembled together 1 . Understanding the principles governing individual and collective movement is important for a number of reasons: for planning urban design 2 , for forecasting and avoiding traffic congestion 3 , for mitigating infectious disease 4-6 , and for contingency planning in extreme situations caused by disasters 7,8 . However, accurately determining the movement patterns in a population is cumbersome and costly, and involves privacy issues.

Geojournal, 2000

The use of wireless location technology and mobile phone data appears to offer a broad range of new opportunities for sophisticated applications in traffic management and monitoring, particularly in the field of incident management. Indeed, due to the high market penetration of mobile phones, it allows the use of very detailed spatial data at lower costs than traditional data collection techniques. Albeit recent, the literature in the field is wide-ranging, although not adequately structured. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic overview of the main studies and projects addressing the use of data derived from mobile phone networks to obtain location and traffic estimations of individuals, as a starting point for further research on incident and traffic management. The advantages and limitations of the process of retrieving location information and transportation parameters from cellular phones are also highlighted. The issues are presented by providing a description of the current background and data types retrievable from the GSM network. In addition to a literature review, the main findings on the so-called Current City project are presented. This is a test system in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) for the extraction of mobile phone data and for the analysis of the spatial network activity patterns. The main purpose of this project is to provide a full picture of the mobility and area consequences of an incident in near real time to create situation awareness. The first results from this project on how telecom data can be utilized for understanding individual presence and mobility in regular situations and during non-recurrent events where regular flows of people are disrupted by an incident are presented. Furthermore, various interesting studies and projects carried out so far in the field are analyzed, leading to the identification of important research issues related to the use of mobile phone data in transportation applications. Relevant issues concern, on the one hand, factors that influence accuracy, reliability, data quality and techniques used for validation, and on the other hand, the specific role of private mobile companies and transportation agencies.

PLOS ONE, 2015

In the past decade, large scale mobile phone data have become available for the study of human movement patterns. These data hold an immense promise for understanding human behavior on a vast scale, and with a precision and accuracy never before possible with censuses, surveys or other existing data collection techniques. There is already a significant body of literature that has made key inroads into understanding human mobility using this exciting new data source, and there have been several different measures of mobility used. However, existing mobile phone based mobility measures are inconsistent, inaccurate, and confounded with social characteristics of local context. New measures would best be developed immediately as they will influence future studies of mobility using mobile phone data. In this article, we do exactly this. We discuss problems with existing mobile phone based measures of mobility and describe new methods for measuring mobility that address these concerns. Our measures of mobility, which incorporate both mobile phone records and detailed GIS data, are designed to address the spatial nature of human mobility, to remain independent of social characteristics of context, and to be comparable across geographic regions and time. We also contribute a discussion of the variety of uses for these new measures in developing a better understanding of how human mobility influences micro-level human behaviors and well-being, and macro-level social organization and change.

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2020

The recent years have witnessed a greater demand for understanding how people move in urban environments. Due to the widespread usage of mobile phones, there have been several trajectorybased studies focusing on extracting the characteristics of human mobility from georeferenced mobile phone data. Mobile positioning data is generally generated as scattered points in CDRs (Call Detail Records). Even though CDR data can be regarded as an inexpensive scalable source of information on human mobility, mobility studies in urban settings based on such data sources still prove to be a research challenge due to the coarseness of CDR spatial granularity. Motivated by the need for transforming large-scale CDRs to movement trajectories, the present study offers a new solution which is made of two principal building blocks: (1) Developing a Bayesian-based induction method through adopting a GIS-based wave propagation model to solve the GSM-based localization problem when methods such as triangulation are not applicable due to the lack of measurements from more than one base station; (2) Reconstruction of movement trajectories from cellular location information using overlapping relations existing between observed cells as well as detection of ping-pong phenomena as auxiliary information. A case study employing CDR and GPS records obtained from an experimental survey on one of the central urban zones of Tehran was conducted, which showed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in comparison to current approaches with respect to three perspectives, including movement path exploration, individual-oriented movement features extraction, and crowd-movement modelling.

GLOBECOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference, 2017

In this paper, we aim at answering the question "at what frequency should one sample individual human movements so that they can be reconstructed from the collected samples with minimum loss of information?". Our quest for a response unveils (i) seemingly universal spectral properties of human mobility, and (ii) a linear scaling law of the localization error with respect to the sampling interval. We conduct analyses using fine-grained GPS trajectories of 119 users worldwide. Our findings have potential applications in ubiquitous computing and mobile service design, in terms of energy efficiency, location-based service operations, active probing of subscribers' positions in mobile networks and trajectory data compression.

NETMOB conference, Oct. 10-11, 2011, MIT, Cambridge, MA

World of Wireless, Mobile …, 2009

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2013

Mobility is intrinsic to human behavior and influences the dynamics of all social phenomena. As such, technology has not remained indifferent to the imprint of mobility. Today we are seeing a shift in tides as the focus is turning towards portability, as well as performance; mobile devices and wireless technologies have become ubiquitous in order to fulfil the needs of modern society. Today the need for mobility management is gradually becoming one of the most important and challenging problems in pervasive computing. In this chapter, we present an analysis of research activities targeting mobility. We present the challenges of analyzing and understanding the mobility (is mobility something that is inherently predictable? are humans socially inclined to follow certain paths?), to techniques that use mobility results to facilitate the interaction between peers in mobile networks, or detect the popularity of certain locations. Our studies are based on the analysis of real user traces extracted from volunteers. We emphasize the entire process of studying the dynamics of mobile users, from collecting the user data, to modelling mobility and interactions, and finally to exploring the predictability of human behavior. We point out the challenges and the limitations of such an endeavour. Furthermore, we propose techniques and methodologies to study the mobility and synergy of mobile users and we show their applicability on two case studies.