Visualize People's Mobility - Both individually and Collectively - Using Mobile Phone Cellular Data

Extraction of mobility patterns of people in a city helps in urban planning, traffic control, transportation management, etc. We present a demo that shows how to extract interesting individual and collective mobility patterns from mobile phone cellular data. Individual patterns are captured using a next place prediction algorithm that builds different Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) models and chooses the best DBN model. Collective patterns are captured by aggregating individual patterns using efficient query processing methods. Each query requires three arguments, i.e., current location cl, current time ct and query time qt. These parameters are varied to capture information at different granularity level resulting in many interesting patterns. Cellular data, although less accurate, irregular and sparser than GPS and less detailed than CDR, is cheap and abundantly available and is used by all sections of people. Demo results show that these shortcomings can be overcome, at least to some extent, by exploiting the underlying repetitive patterns. As part of individual patterns, the system predicts the next place (along with a confidence measure) for a given combination of current location, Time-of-Day and Day-of-week of a user. Collective mobility patterns can start from a planning area or a latlon (with a radius). It visually shows the major destinations along with their intensity. An interesting finding was that planning areas with higher population has higher predictability. The UI system also shows heat maps that show continuous mobility of people. These types of patterns can have significant bearing on urban planning and related applications.