Connecting mobility, online behavior and urban structure from cellular network data

Abstract

Due to the accelerating rate of development of Mobile Internet, the role of mobile phone becomes increasingly vital in people's life. Through the data generated by mobile phones, users' mobility characteristic and online interests can be roundly mined. By connecting human mobility and online behavior, many achievements have been proposed and then applied in many services to improve the quality of people's life. In this paper, by using the cellular network data collected from certain urban city in northeast China over a month, we first extract users' important locations. Based on this, we apply the topic model to extract mobility topics of users and explore users' application usage. We observe that different user mobility properties accompanied with different online behavior tendencies of users. Besides, we extract cross-town events based on users' important locations to explore the macroscopical organization of the city. The results of our research provide a comprehensive understanding of user behavior in Mobile Internet and city structure, which are valuable for the practitioners in the fields of Location-Based Services (LBS) and urban planning.