Large-Scale Human Mobility Analysis Based on Mobile Phone and Social Media Communication: A Case-Study in Africa

Abstract

Mobile phone and social media communication are sometimes explored as viable sources of location information for human mobility research. To the best of our knowledge, however, no one has studied how location information obtained via these two event-based techniques compare to each other. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of obtaining location information using mobile phone records and social media communication. The comparison was made under similar conditions. Specifically, the two datasets are from the same geographical area (a developing country in Africa), have the same number of users, and were collected over a similar period of time (months and days). Our analysis shows that the source of the location information used has a significant impact on what can be perceived in terms of individual mobility within a population. Using the results from these two datasets, we conclude that mobile phone communication is a better source of location information for human mobility research when compared to social media communication. We argue that our conclusion exists due to the relation of social media communication to economic and demographic factors.