An Interactive Analytics Tool for Understanding Location Semantics and Mobility of Users Using Mobile Network Data

Knowledge about population distribution of planning areas helps in making urban development decisions. Two important criteria are: where do people live? and where do they work? In this paper we propose methods to find home and workplaces from mobile network data. Home and work places are essential for discovery of mobility profiles of users. Validation of home and workplace prediction is not straight forward. We validate our methods using correlation with external data. Validation results show that even though a single cellular provider has only a portion of the entire population as its users, distribution of home and work places predicted using its mobile network data match that of government statistics. On the basis of this matching, we can have faith in distributions of more difficult statistics extracted from mobile network data which are difficult to obtain from external sources. We implemented an interactive system to show various distributions such as people living and working in different planning areas, and people working in different job sectors such as manufacturing. Interesting relationships are found by calculating joint distributions, e.g., Where do people, living in a planning area, work, and vice versa. Planning areas are ranked by the average distance traveled from home to work. Another interesting fact we extract is balance. Balance of a planning area is high if people live and work there, it is low if people living in a planning area work in other planning areas. We extend these statistics to regions which consist of many planning areas. The goal of this interactive system is to understand location semantics and mobility of users to aid in making urban development decisions. A video recording with subtitles is uploaded in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-7-DsCymw.