Mobile phone data's potential for informing infrastructure planning in developing countries

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1907.04812
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Hadrien Salat; Zbigniew Smoreda; Markus Schläpfer
• Keywords: Mobile phone; Proxy (statistics); Consumption

High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for infrastructure planning such as being updated real-time, including mobility information recording visitors' activity. We combine various sets from Senegal data's potential replace insufficient As an applied case, we test their ability at predicting domestic electricity consumption. show that, contrary common belief, average does correlate well with density. However, it can provide better consumption estimates than basic data. More importantly, use curve network clustering techniques enhance the accuracy of predictions, recover good mapping reduce collection required substantially smaller samples.