Doyle, John (2014) Estimating Movement from Mobile Telephony Data. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
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Abstract
Mobile enabled devices are ubiquitous in modern society. The information gathered by
their normal service operations has become one of the primary data sources used in the
understanding of human mobility, social connection and information transfer. This thesis
investigates techniques that can extract useful information from anonymised call detail records
(CDR). CDR consist of mobile subscriber data related to people in connection with the network
operators, the nature of their communication activity (voice, SMS, data, etc.), duration of the
activity and starting time of the activity and servicing cell identification numbers of both the
sender and the receiver when available.
The main contributions of the research are a methodology for distance measurements
which enables the identification of mobile subscriber travel paths and a methodology for
population density estimation based on significant mobile subscriber regions of interest. In
addition, insights are given into how a mobile network operator may use geographically located
subscriber data to create new revenue streams and improved network performance. A range of
novel algorithms and techniques underpin the development of these methodologies. These
include, among others, techniques for CDR feature extraction, data visualisation and CDR data
cleansing.
The primary data source used in this body of work was the CDR of Meteor, a mobile
network operator in the Republic of Ireland. The Meteor network under investigation has just
over 1 million customers, which represents approximately a quarter of the country’s 4.6 million
inhabitants, and operates using both 2G and 3G cellular telephony technologies.
Results show that the steady state vector analysis of modified Markov chain mobility
models can return population density estimates comparable to population estimates obtained
through a census. Evaluated using a test dataset, results of travel path identification showed
that developed distance measurements achieved greater accuracy when classifying the routes
CDR journey trajectories took compared to traditional trajectory distance measurements.
Results from subscriber segmentation indicate that subscribers who have perceived similar
relationships to geographical features can be grouped based on weighted steady state mobility
vectors. Overall, this thesis proposes novel algorithms and techniques for the estimation of
movement from mobile telephony data addressing practical issues related to sampling, privacy
and spatial uncertainty.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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Keywords: | Estimating Movement; Mobile Telephony Data; |
Academic Unit: | Faculty of Science and Engineering > Electronic Engineering |
Item ID: | 5400 |
Depositing User: | IR eTheses |
Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2014 11:23 |
Funders: | Science Foundation of Ireland Grant No. (07/SRC/I1168), IRCSET, ERSI |
URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/5400 |
Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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