A Big Data Driven Framework for Duplicate Device Detection from Multi-sourced Mobile Device Location Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective, data-driven framework for identifying duplicate mobile devices in multi-sourced location datasets, enhancing data coverage and accuracy for large-scale mobility analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology leveraging travel pattern uniqueness to detect duplicate devices across multiple data sources without bias.

Findings

Over 99.6% accuracy in matching devices sharing key location attributes

Effective integration of multi-sourced data improves spatial coverage

Successful application to national-level data for travel surveys

Abstract

Mobile Device Location Data (MDLD) has been popularly utilized in various fields. Yet its large-scale applications are limited because of either biased or insufficient spatial coverage of the data from individual data vendors. One approach to improve the data coverage is to leverage the data from multiple data vendors and integrate them to build a more representative dataset. For data integration, further treatments on the multi-sourced dataset are required due to several reasons. First, the possibility of carrying more than one device could result in duplicated observations from the same data subject. Additionally, when utilizing multiple data sources, the same device might be captured by more than one data provider. Our paper proposes a data integration methodology for multi-sourced data to investigate the feasibility of integrating data from several sources without introducing additional biases to the data. By leveraging the uniqueness of travel pattern of each device, duplicate devices are identified. The proposed methodology is shown to be cost-effective while it achieves the desired accuracy level. Our findings suggest that devices sharing the same imputed home location and the top five most-visited locations during a month can represent the same user in the MDLD. It is shown that more than 99.6% of the sample devices having the aforementioned attribute in common are observed at the same location simultaneously. Finally, the proposed algorithm has been successfully applied to the national-level MDLD of 2020 to produce the national passenger origin-destination data for the NextGeneration National Household Travel Survey (NextGen NHTS) program.