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Moving and Calling: Mobile Phone Data Quality Measurements and Spatiotemporal Uncertainty in Human Mobility Studies

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Book cover Geographic Information Science at the Heart of Europe

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

In the past few years, mobile network data are considered as a useful complementary source of information for human mobility research. Mobile phone datasets contain massive amount of spatiotemporal localization of millions of users. The analyze of such huge amount of data for mobility studies reveals many issues such as time computation, users sampling, spatiotemporal heterogeneities, semantic incompleteness. In this chapter, two issues are addressed: (1) location sampling aiming at decreasing computation time without losing useful information on the one hand and to eliminate data considered as noise in the other hand and (2) users sampling whose goal is to select users having relevant information. For the first issue two measures allowing eliminating redundant information and ping-pong positions are proposed. The second issue requires the definition of a set of measures allowing estimating mobile phone data quality. New methods to qualify mobile phone data at local and global level are proposed. The methods are tested on one-day mobile phone data coming from technical mobile network probes.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our colleague, Cezary Ziemlicki, who preprocessed data and has discussed with us many technical issues related to this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology and Economics of Networks and Services department, Orange Labs R&D, Paris, France

    Corina Iovan, Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond, Thomas Couronné & Zbigniew Smoreda

  2. Laboratoire Cogit, Institut Géographique National, Saint-Mandé, France

    Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond

Authors
  1. Corina Iovan
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  2. Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond
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  3. Thomas Couronné
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  4. Zbigniew Smoreda
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Corina Iovan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Spatial Applications Division, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Heverlee, Vlaams Brabant, Belgium

    Danny Vandenbroucke

  2. COGIT, Institut Geographique National France (IGN-France), Saint-Mandé Cedex, Paris, France

    Bénédicte Bucher

  3. Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Vlaams Brabant, Belgium

    Joep Crompvoets

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Iovan, C., Olteanu-Raimond, AM., Couronné, T., Smoreda, Z. (2013). Moving and Calling: Mobile Phone Data Quality Measurements and Spatiotemporal Uncertainty in Human Mobility Studies. In: Vandenbroucke, D., Bucher, B., Crompvoets, J. (eds) Geographic Information Science at the Heart of Europe. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00615-4_14

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