Friday, February 9, 2018

A survey of the literature on mobile phone datasets analysis

A good paper giving a nice overview of the research using mobile phone datasets (mostly CDR data). A lot of interesting research looking at human mobility patterns, spatial and temporal networks, urban and regional development. This paper is already 3 years old, though, and things move fairly quickly in this type of research.

Some of the authors covered in this review are on Twitter. I've tagged them here and here in case you'd like to follow them.

Blondel, V. D., Decuyper, A., & Krings, G. (2015). A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis. EPJ Data Science, 4(1), 10.

Abstract:
In this paper, we review some advances made recently in the study of mobile phone datasets. This area of research has emerged a decade ago, with the increasing availability of large-scale anonymized datasets, and has grown into a stand-alone topic. We survey the contributions made so far on the social networks that can be constructed with such data, the study of personal mobility, geographical partitioning, urban planning, and help towards development as well as security and privacy issues.

image credit: Wang et al. 2009