A Day of Your Days: Estimating Individual Daily Journeys Using Mobile Data to Understand Urban Flow

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to estimate individual daily journeys from mobile data, enabling detailed analysis of urban mobility patterns with high accuracy and responsiveness to anomalies, surpassing traditional surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to analyze mobile data at the individual level for estimating daily journeys and urban flow, improving granularity and real-time insights over existing methods.

Findings

High correlation ($\rho=0.89$) with traditional travel surveys.

Effectively captures external anomalies in daily travel patterns.

Method suitable for urban computing applications.

Abstract

Nowadays, travel surveys provide rich information about urban mobility and commuting patterns. But, at the same time, they have drawbacks: they are static pictures of a dynamic phenomena, are expensive to make, and take prolonged periods of time to finish. However, the availability of mobile usage data (Call Detail Records) makes the study of urban mobility possible at levels not known before. This has been done in the past with good results--mobile data makes possible to find and understand aggregated mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose to analyze mobile data at individual level by estimating daily journeys, and use those journeys to build Origin-Destiny matrices to understand urban flow. We evaluate this approach with large anonymized CDRs from Santiago, Chile, and find that our method has a high correlation ($\rho = 0.89$) with the current travel survey, and that it captures external anomalies in daily travel patterns, making our method suitable for inclusion into urban computing applications.