Abstract
Inferring mobile phone users’ home location, i.e., assigning a location in space to a user based on data generated by the mobile phone network, is a central task in leveraging mobile phone data to study social and urban phenomena. Despite its widespread use, home detection relies on assumptions that are difficult to check without ground truth, i.e., where the individual who owns the device resides. In this paper, we present a dataset that comprises the mobile phone activity of sixty-five participants for whom the geographical coordinates of their residence location are known. The mobile phone activity refers to Call Detail Records (CDRs), eXtended Detail Records (XDRs), and Control Plane Records (CPRs), which vary in their temporal granularity and differ in the data generation mechanism. We provide an unprecedented evaluation of the accuracy of home detection algorithms and quantify the amount of data needed for each stream to carry out successful home detection for each stream. Our work is useful for researchers and practitioners to minimize data requests and maximize the accuracy of the home antenna location.
Highlights
Nowadays, there is a strong demand by all branches of government, including national statistical offices, to invest in projects that explore how we can integrate novel digital data into all kinds of official statistics
This paper provides an attempt at a fine-grained validation of home detection algorithms (HDAs) on individual-level ground truth data and three streams of mobile phone records – Call Detail Records (CDRs), XDRs, and Control Plane Records (CPRs)
For every stream - CDRs, XDRs, and CPRs - and for every user u, we calculate the most active towers given the specific criteria of each HDA
Summary
There is a strong demand by all branches of government, including national statistical offices, to invest in projects that explore how we can integrate novel digital data into all kinds of official statistics (e.g., mobility, immigration, epidemic control). This paper provides an attempt at a fine-grained validation of HDAs on individual-level ground truth data and three streams of mobile phone records – CDRs, XDRs, and CPRs. 65 users working for Telefónica Chile gave their written consent to provide us access to their phone records for two weeks, as well as their actual address of residence.
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