From cellular positioning data to trajectories: Steps towards a more accurate mobility exploration

Abstract

The recent years have witnessed a greater demand for understanding how people move in urban environments. Due to the widespread usage of mobile phones, there have been several trajectory-based studies focusing on extracting the characteristics of human mobility from georeferenced mobile phone data. Mobile positioning data is generally generated as scattered points in CDRs (Call Detail Records). Even though CDR data can be regarded as an inexpensive scalable source of information on human mobility, mobility studies in urban settings based on such data sources still prove to be a research challenge due to the coarseness of CDR spatial granularity. Motivated by the need for transforming large-scale CDRs to movement trajectories, the present study offers a new solution which is made of two principal building blocks: (1) Developing a Bayesian-based induction method through adopting a GIS-based wave propagation model to solve the GSM-based localization problem when methods such as triangulation are not applicable due to the lack of measurements from more than one base station; (2) Reconstruction of movement trajectories from cellular location information using overlapping relations existing between observed cells as well as detection of ping-pong phenomena as auxiliary information. A case study employing CDR and GPS records obtained from an experimental survey on one of the central urban zones of Tehran was conducted, which showed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in comparison to current approaches with respect to three perspectives, including movement path exploration, individual-oriented movement features extraction, and crowd-movement modelling.