Population Mobility Dynamics Estimated from Mobile Telephony Data

• DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2014.888904
• Publication Date: 2014-06-09T13:43:56Z
• Authors: John Doyle; Peter Hung; Ronan Farrell; Seán McLoone
• Keywords: imperfect trajectories; 330; /dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3322; Markov chain; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; population estimation; 02 engineering and technology; call detail records; name=Urban Studies; stationary distribution

AbstractIn the last decade, mobile phones and mobile devices using mobile cellular telecommunication network connections have become ubiquitous. In several developed countries, the penetration of such devices has surpassed 100 percent. They facilitate communication and access to large quantities of data without the requirement of a fixed location or connection. Assuming mobile phones usually are in close proximity with the user, their cellular activities and locations are indicative of the user's activities and movements. As such, those cellular devices may be considered as a large scale distributed human activity sensing platform. This paper uses mobile operator telephony data to visualize the regional flows of people across the Republic of Ireland. In addition, the use of modified Markov chains for the ranking of significant regions of interest to mobile subscribers is investigated. Methodology is then presented which demonstrates how the ranking of significant regions of interest may be used to estimat...