Characterizing mobility patterns of people in developing countries using their mobile phone data

Abstract

Location data collected from mobile phone users provide an ideal platform to generate human mobility patterns. These patterns give us insights into how people travel in their dayto- day lives.With availability of cellular data, either at large-scale but with low location accuracy or at small-scale but with high location accuracy, studying mobility patterns is now possible. An example of former dataset is CDRs (Call Detail Records) and that of latter is GSM/WiFi/GPS traces collected from mobile phones. So far the studies have been focused on data collected in developed countries. In this paper, we make a first attempt in finding and analyzing mobility patterns of people in developing countries using both the categories of data. We use publicly available CDR data and we collect our own data for capturing fine-grained location. Ours is the first dataset of its kind that is publicly available. We analyze this data to find movement as well as place visiting patterns, compare our findings with existing studies, and discuss their implications. For example, urban people in developing countries travel farther distances in their day to day life as compared to people living in non-urban areas. Also, distance travelled by urban people in developing countries is as much as six times lower compared to developed countries.