Nationwide Hourly Population Estimating at the Neighborhood Scale in the United States Using Stable-Attendance Anchor Calibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces SAAC, a novel framework that uses stable attendance locations as calibration anchors to accurately estimate hourly population presence across the US from smartphone mobility data.

Contribution

SAAC is the first method to incorporate regular attendance anchors for calibrating and converting smartphone mobility data into dynamic population estimates at a fine temporal scale.

Findings

Population estimates align with known urban mobility patterns.

The framework effectively corrects for observation bias and heterogeneity.

Hourly population data are accessible for various applications.

Abstract

Traditional population datasets are largely static and therefore unable to capture the strong temporal dynamics of human presence driven by daily mobility. Recent smartphone-based mobility data offer unprecedented spatiotemporal coverage, yet translating these opportunistic observations into accurate population estimates remains challenging due to incomplete sensing, spatially heterogeneous device penetration, and unstable observation processes. We propose a Stable-Attendance Anchor Calibration (SAAC) framework to reconstruct hourly population presence at the Census block group level across the United States. SAAC formulates population estimation as a balance-based population accounting problem, combining residential population with time-varying inbound and outbound mobility inferred from device-event observations. To address observation bias and identifiability limitations, the framework leverages locations with highly regular attendance as calibration anchors, using high schools in this study. These anchors enable estimation of observation scaling factors that correct for under-recorded mobility events. By integrating anchor-based calibration with an explicit sampling model, SAAC enables consistent conversion from observed device events to population presence at fine temporal resolution. The inferred population patterns are consistent with established empirical findings in prior mobility and urban population studies. SAAC provides a generalizable framework for transforming large-scale, biased digital trace data into interpretable dynamic population products, with implications for urban science, public health, and human mobility research. The hourly population estimates can be accessed at: https://gladcolor.github.io/hourly_population.