A Study of the Spatio-Temporal Correlations in Mobile Calls Networks
This work addresses the need for improved data analysis methods in telecommunications to understand spatio-temporal patterns in mobile call networks, but it is incremental as it applies existing techniques to a new dataset.
The study tackled the problem of segmenting a territory and characterizing areas based on mobile phone usage behavior by analyzing call detail records from France over five months, resulting in a two-stage analysis that groups antennas by call distribution patterns and examines temporal changes in behavior across the country.
For the last few years, the amount of data has significantly increased in the companies. It is the reason why data analysis methods have to evolve to meet new demands. In this article, we introduce a practical analysis of a large database from a telecommunication operator. The problem is to segment a territory and characterize the retrieved areas owing to their inhabitant behavior in terms of mobile telephony. We have call detail records collected during five months in France. We propose a two stages analysis. The first one aims at grouping source antennas which originating calls are similarly distributed on target antennas and conversely for target antenna w.r.t. source antenna. A geographic projection of the data is used to display the results on a map of France. The second stage discretizes the time into periods between which we note changes in distributions of calls emerging from the clusters of source antennas. This enables an analysis of temporal changes of inhabitants behavior in every area of the country.