Data for Development: the D4D Challenge on Mobile Phone Data

TL;DR

This paper describes the datasets provided by the D4D challenge, which include anonymized mobile phone call and SMS data from Ivory Coast, aimed at supporting socio-economic development research.

Contribution

It introduces four detailed mobile phone datasets and explains their structure, scope, and potential applications for development-related studies.

Findings

Datasets cover 5 million users over several months.

Includes call traffic, individual trajectories, and communication graphs.

Designed to facilitate research on socio-economic development.

Abstract

The Orange "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge is an open data challenge on anonymous call patterns of Orange's mobile phone users in Ivory Coast. The goal of the challenge is to help address society development questions in novel ways by contributing to the socio-economic development and well-being of the Ivory Coast population. Participants to the challenge are given access to four mobile phone datasets and the purpose of this paper is to describe the four datasets. The website http://www.d4d.orange.com contains more information about the participation rules. The datasets are based on anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) of phone calls and SMS exchanges between five million of Orange's customers in Ivory Coast between December 1, 2011 and April 28, 2012. The datasets are: (a) antenna-to-antenna traffic on an hourly basis, (b) individual trajectories for 50,000 customers for two week time windows with antenna location information, (3) individual trajectories for 500,000 customers over the entire observation period with sub-prefecture location information, and (4) a sample of communication graphs for 5,000 customers