CellSense

Author(s):  
Zhihan Fang ◽  
Yu Yang ◽  
Guang Yang ◽  
Yikuan Xian ◽  
Fan Zhang ◽  
...  

Data from the cellular network have been proved as one of the most promising way to understand large-scale human mobility for various ubiquitous computing applications due to the high penetration of cellphones and low collection cost. Existing mobility models driven by cellular network data suffer from sparse spatial-temporal observations because user locations are recorded with cellphone activities, e.g., calls, text, or internet access. In this paper, we design a human mobility recovery system called CellSense to take the sparse cellular billing data (CBR) as input and outputs dense continuous records to recover the sensing gap when using cellular networks as sensing systems to sense the human mobility. There is limited work on this kind of recovery systems at large scale because even though it is straightforward to design a recovery system based on regression models, it is very challenging to evaluate these models at large scale due to the lack of the ground truth data. In this paper, we explore a new opportunity based on the upgrade of cellular infrastructures to obtain cellular network signaling data as the ground truth data, which log the interaction between cellphones and cellular towers at signal levels (e.g., attaching, detaching, paging) even without billable activities. Based on the signaling data, we design a system CellSense for human mobility recovery by integrating collective mobility patterns with individual mobility modeling, which achieves the 35.3% improvement over the state-of-the-art models. The key application of our recovery model is to take regular sparse CBR data that a researcher already has, and to recover the missing data due to sensing gaps of CBR data to produce a dense cellular data for them to train a machine learning model for their use cases, e.g., next location prediction.

Author(s):  
N. W. Hu ◽  
P. J. Jin

The emergence of location based social network (LBSN) services make it accessible and affordable to study individuals’ mobility patterns in a fine-grained level. Via mobile devices, LBSN enables the availability of large-scale location-sensitive data with spatial and temporal context dimensions, which is capable of the potential to provide traffic patterns with significantly higher spatial and temporal resolution at a much lower cost than can be achieved by traditional methods. In this paper, the Foursquare LBSN data was applied to analyze the trip attraction for the urban area in Austin, Texas, USA. We explore one time-dependent function to validate the LBSN’s data with the origin-destination matrix regarded as the ground truth data. The objective of this paper is to investigate one new validation method for trip distribution. The results illustrate the promising potential of studying the dynamic trip attraction estimation with LBSN data for urban trip pattern analysis and monitoring.


Author(s):  
Fan Zhou ◽  
Qiang Gao ◽  
Goce Trajcevski ◽  
Kunpeng Zhang ◽  
Ting Zhong ◽  
...  

Trajectory-User Linking (TUL) is an essential task in Geo-tagged social media (GTSM) applications, enabling personalized Point of Interest (POI) recommendation and activity identification. Existing works on mining mobility patterns often model trajectories using Markov Chains (MC) or recurrent neural networks (RNN) -- either assuming independence between non-adjacent locations or following a shallow generation process. However, most of them ignore the fact that human trajectories are often sparse, high-dimensional and may contain embedded hierarchical structures. We tackle the TUL problem with a semi-supervised learning framework, called TULVAE (TUL via Variational AutoEncoder), which learns the human mobility in a neural generative architecture with stochastic latent variables that span hidden states in RNN. TULVAE alleviates the data sparsity problem by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data and represents the hierarchical and structural semantics of trajectories with high-dimensional latent variables. Our experiments demonstrate that TULVAE improves efficiency and linking performance in real GTSM datasets, in comparison to existing methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (14) ◽  
pp. 2861 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Crivellari ◽  
Euro Beinat

The interest in human mobility analysis has increased with the rapid growth of positioning technology and motion tracking, leading to a variety of studies based on trajectory recordings. Mapping the routes that people commonly perform was revealed to be very useful for location-based service applications, where individual mobility behaviors can potentially disclose meaningful information about each customer and be fruitfully used for personalized recommendation systems. This paper tackles a novel trajectory labeling problem related to the context of user profiling in “smart” tourism, inferring the nationality of individual users on the basis of their motion trajectories. In particular, we use large-scale motion traces of short-term foreign visitors as a way of detecting the nationality of individuals. This task is not trivial, relying on the hypothesis that foreign tourists of different nationalities may not only visit different locations, but also move in a different way between the same locations. The problem is defined as a multinomial classification with a few tens of classes (nationalities) and sparse location-based trajectory data. We hereby propose a machine learning-based methodology, consisting of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network trained on vector representations of locations, in order to capture the underlying semantics of user mobility patterns. Experiments conducted on a real-world big dataset demonstrate that our method achieves considerably higher performances than baseline and traditional approaches.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Yabe ◽  
Kota Tsubouchi ◽  
Naoya Fujiwara ◽  
Takayuki Wada ◽  
Yoshihide Sekimoto ◽  
...  

Abstract While large scale mobility data has become a popular tool to monitor the mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of non-compulsory measures in Tokyo, Japan on human mobility patterns has been under-studied. Here, we analyze the temporal changes in human mobility behavior, social contact rates, and their correlations with the transmissibility of COVID-19, using mobility data collected from more than 200K anonymized mobile phone users in Tokyo. The analysis concludes that by April 15th (1 week into state of emergency), human mobility behavior decreased by around 50%, resulting in a 70% reduction of social contacts in Tokyo, showing the strong relationships with non-compulsory measures. Furthermore, the reduction in data-driven human mobility metrics showed correlation with the decrease in estimated effective reproduction number of COVID-19 in Tokyo. Such empirical insights could inform policy makers on deciding sufficient levels of mobility reduction to contain the disease.


Author(s):  
Suppawong Tuarob ◽  
Conrad S. Tucker

The acquisition and mining of product feature data from online sources such as customer review websites and large scale social media networks is an emerging area of research. In many existing design methodologies that acquire product feature preferences form online sources, the underlying assumption is that product features expressed by customers are explicitly stated and readily observable to be mined using product feature extraction tools. In many scenarios however, product feature preferences expressed by customers are implicit in nature and do not directly map to engineering design targets. For example, a customer may implicitly state “wow I have to squint to read this on the screen”, when the explicit product feature may be a larger screen. The authors of this work propose an inference model that automatically assigns the most probable explicit product feature desired by a customer, given an implicit preference expressed. The algorithm iteratively refines its inference model by presenting a hypothesis and using ground truth data, determining its statistical validity. A case study involving smartphone product features expressed through Twitter networks is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro G. Lind ◽  
Adriano Moreira

AbstractWe present a study on human mobility at small spatial scales. Differently from large scale mobility, recently studied through dollar-bill tracking and mobile phone data sets within one big country or continent, we report Brownian features of human mobility at smaller scales. In particular, the scaling exponents found at the smallest scales is typically close to one-half, differently from the larger values for the exponent characterizing mobility at larger scales. We carefully analyze 12-month data of the Eduroam database within the Portuguese university of Minho. A full procedure is introduced with the aim of properly characterizing the human mobility within the network of access points composing the wireless system of the university. In particular, measures of flux are introduced for estimating a distance between access points. This distance is typically non-Euclidean, since the spatial constraints at such small scales distort the continuum space on which human mobility occurs. Since two different exponents are found depending on the scale human motion takes place, we raise the question at which scale the transition from Brownian to non-Brownian motion takes place. In this context, we discuss how the numerical approach can be extended to larger scales, using the full Eduroam in Europe and in Asia, for uncovering the transition between both dynamical regimes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 160950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Panigutti ◽  
Michele Tizzoni ◽  
Paolo Bajardi ◽  
Zbigniew Smoreda ◽  
Vittoria Colizza

The recent availability of large-scale call detail record data has substantially improved our ability of quantifying human travel patterns with broad applications in epidemiology. Notwithstanding a number of successful case studies, previous works have shown that using different mobility data sources, such as mobile phone data or census surveys, to parametrize infectious disease models can generate divergent outcomes. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent epidemic modelling results may vary when using different proxies for human movements. Here, we systematically compare 658 000 simulated outbreaks generated with a spatially structured epidemic model based on two different human mobility networks: a commuting network of France extracted from mobile phone data and another extracted from a census survey. We compare epidemic patterns originating from all the 329 possible outbreak seed locations and identify the structural network properties of the seeding nodes that best predict spatial and temporal epidemic patterns to be alike. We find that similarity of simulated epidemics is significantly correlated to connectivity, traffic and population size of the seeding nodes, suggesting that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Hui Xiong ◽  
Kaiqiang Xie ◽  
Lu Ma ◽  
Feng Yuan ◽  
Rui Shen

Understanding human mobility patterns is of great importance for a wide range of applications from social networks to transportation planning. Toward this end, the spatial-temporal information of a large-scale dataset of taxi trips was collected via GPS, from March 10 to 23, 2014, in Beijing. The data contain trips generated by a great portion of taxi vehicles citywide. We revealed that the geographic displacement of those trips follows the power law distribution and the corresponding travel time follows a mixture of the exponential and power law distribution. To identify human mobility patterns, a topic model with the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm was proposed to infer the sixty-five key topics. By measuring the variation of trip displacement over time, we find that the travel distance in the morning rush hour is much shorter than that in the other time. As for daily patterns, it shows that taxi mobility presents weekly regularity both on weekdays and on weekends. Among different days in the same week, mobility patterns on Tuesday and Wednesday are quite similar. By quantifying the trip distance along time, we find that Topic 44 exhibits dominant patterns, which means distance less than 10 km is predominant no matter what time in a day. The findings could be references for travelers to arrange trips and policymakers to formulate sound traffic management policies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e276 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Watson ◽  
Zach Gelbaum ◽  
Mathew Titus ◽  
Grant Zoch ◽  
David Wrathall

When, where and how people move is a fundamental part of how human societies organize around every-day needs as well as how people adapt to risks, such as economic scarcity or instability, and natural disasters. Our ability to characterize and predict the diversity of human mobility patterns has been greatly expanded by the availability of Call Detail Records (CDR) from mobile phone cellular networks. The size and richness of these datasets is at the same time a blessing and a curse: while there is great opportunity to extract useful information from these datasets, it remains a challenge to do so in a meaningful way. In particular, human mobility is multiscale, meaning a diversity of patterns of mobility occur simultaneously, which vary according to timing, magnitude and spatial extent. To identify and characterize the main spatio-temporal scales and patterns of human mobility we examined CDR data from the Orange mobile network in Senegal using a new form of spectral graph wavelets, an approach from manifold learning. This unsupervised analysis reduces the dimensionality of the data to reveal seasonal changes in human mobility, as well as mobility patterns associated with large-scale but short-term religious events. The novel insight into human mobility patterns afforded by manifold learning methods like spectral graph wavelets have clear applications for urban planning, infrastructure design as well as hazard risk management, especially as climate change alters the biophysical landscape on which people work and live, leading to new patterns of human migration around the world.


Author(s):  
Marian Muste ◽  
Ton Hoitink

With a continuous global increase in flood frequency and intensity, there is an immediate need for new science-based solutions for flood mitigation, resilience, and adaptation that can be quickly deployed in any flood-prone area. An integral part of these solutions is the availability of river discharge measurements delivered in real time with high spatiotemporal density and over large-scale areas. Stream stages and the associated discharges are the most perceivable variables of the water cycle and the ones that eventually determine the levels of hazard during floods. Consequently, the availability of discharge records (a.k.a. streamflows) is paramount for flood-risk management because they provide actionable information for organizing the activities before, during, and after floods, and they supply the data for planning and designing floodplain infrastructure. Moreover, the discharge records represent the ground-truth data for developing and continuously improving the accuracy of the hydrologic models used for forecasting streamflows. Acquiring discharge data for streams is critically important not only for flood forecasting and monitoring but also for many other practical uses, such as monitoring water abstractions for supporting decisions in various socioeconomic activities (from agriculture to industry, transportation, and recreation) and for ensuring healthy ecological flows. All these activities require knowledge of past, current, and future flows in rivers and streams. Given its importance, an ability to measure the flow in channels has preoccupied water users for millennia. Starting with the simplest volumetric methods to estimate flows, the measurement of discharge has evolved through continued innovation to sophisticated methods so that today we can continuously acquire and communicate the data in real time. There is no essential difference between the instruments and methods used to acquire streamflow data during normal conditions versus during floods. The measurements during floods are, however, complex, hazardous, and of limited accuracy compared with those acquired during normal flows. The essential differences in the configuration and operation of the instruments and methods for discharge estimation stem from the type of measurements they acquire—that is, discrete and autonomous measurements (i.e., measurements that can be taken any time any place) and those acquired continuously (i.e., estimates based on indirect methods developed for fixed locations). Regardless of the measurement situation and approach, the main concern of the data providers for flooding (as well as for other areas of water resource management) is the timely delivery of accurate discharge data at flood-prone locations across river basins.


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