title: Mobile phone call data as a regional socio-economic proxy indicator.
abstract: The advent of publishing anonymized call detail records opens the door for temporal and spatial human dynamics studies. Such studies, besides being useful for creating universal models for mobility patterns, could be also used for creating new socio-economic proxy indicators that will not rely only on the local or state institutions. In this paper, from the frequency of calls at different times of the day, in different small regional units (sub-prefectures) in Côte d'Ivoire, we infer users' home and work sub-prefectures. This division of users enables us to analyze different mobility and calling patterns for the different regions. We then compare how those patterns correlate to the data from other sources, such as: news for particular events in the given period, census data, economic activity, poverty index, power plants and energy grid data. Our results show high correlation in many of the cases revealing the diversity of socio-economic insights that can be inferred using only mobile phone call data. The methods and the results may be particularly relevant to policy-makers engaged in poverty reduction initiatives as they can provide an affordable tool in the context of resource-constrained developing economies, such as Côte d'Ivoire's.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Sanja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Šćepanović
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia.
authors.forename: Igor
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Mishkovski
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Pan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hui
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Jukka K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Nurminen
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Antti
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ylä-Jääski
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003142:Communication; D007560:Cote d'Ivoire; D006801:Humans; D011156:Population Density; D012923:Social Class; D014186:Transportation