Country-scale Exploratory Analysis of Call Detail Records through the Lens of Data Grid Models
This provides a generic methodology for telecommunications and data analysts to extract insights from CDRs, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data grid models.
The authors tackled the problem of summarizing Call Detail Records (CDRs) for exploratory analysis by developing a parameter-free method to estimate joint distributions of call variables, and demonstrated its relevance through case studies on real-world data from Ivory Coast.
Call Detail Records (CDRs) are data recorded by telecommunications companies, consisting of basic informations related to several dimensions of the calls made through the network: the source, destination, date and time of calls. CDRs data analysis has received much attention in the recent years since it might reveal valuable information about human behavior. It has shown high added value in many application domains like e.g., communities analysis or network planning. In this paper, we suggest a generic methodology for summarizing information contained in CDRs data. The method is based on a parameter-free estimation of the joint distribution of the variables that describe the calls. We also suggest several well-founded criteria that allows one to browse the summary at various granularities and to explore the summary by means of insightful visualizations. The method handles network graph data, temporal sequence data as well as user mobility data stemming from original CDRs data. We show the relevance of our methodology for various case studies on real-world CDRs data from Ivory Coast.