Paper Info
Title
Human mobility modeling at metropolitan scales
Abstract
Models of human mobility have broad applicability in fields such as mobile computing, urban planning, and ecology. This paper proposes and evaluates WHERE, a novel approach to modeling how large populations move within different metropolitan areas. WHERE takes as input spatial and temporal probability distributions drawn from empirical data, such as Call Detail Records (CDRs) from a cellular telephone network, and produces synthetic CDRs for a synthetic population. We have validated WHERE against billions of anonymous location samples for hundreds of thousands of phones in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. We found that WHERE offers significantly higher fidelity than other modeling approaches. For example, daily range of travel statistics fall within one mile of their true values, an improvement of more than 14 times over a Weighted Random Waypoint model. Our modeling techniques and synthetic CDRs can be applied to a wide range of problems while avoiding many of the privacy concerns surrounding real CDRs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2307636.2307659
MobiSys
Keywords
Field
DocType
synthetic cdrs,metropolitan scale,human mobility modeling,los angeles metropolitan area,real cdrs,synthetic population,wide range,different metropolitan area,modeling technique,daily range,call detail records,modeling approach,urban planning,mobile computer,mobility model,probability distribution
Mobile computing,Telephone network,Population,Data mining,Fidelity,Telecommunications,Computer science,Real-time computing,Urban planning,Probability distribution,Metropolitan area,Random waypoint model
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
110
4.88
22
Authors
7
Search Limit
100110
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sibren Isaacman142020.42
Richard Becker21104.88
Ramón Cáceres31608398.73
Margaret Martonosi48647715.76
James Rowland51104.88
Alexander Varshavsky685836.87
Walter Willinger782391356.85