Home and Work Place Prediction for Urban Planning Using Mobile Network Data

We present methods to predict and validate home and work places of anonymized users using their mobile network data. Knowledge of home and work place of a user is essential in order to find his (and overall population) mobility profiles. There are many methods that predict home and work places using GPS data. But unlike GPS data, mobile network data using GSM do not provide the exact location of a phone event. We use a novel criterion that combines an extracted feature from mobile data (i.e., Inactivity - no phone event for a given period of time) with open source data about location category % (i.e., Streetdirectory.com) to predict home location. Results show that the new criterion gives better prediction accuracy than inactivity alone. We predict work place using the idea that one goes to her work place on most of the weekdays but rarely on weekends. We validate our methods by comparing against the ground truth obtained from open source data. Validation results show that our proposed methods are about 25% more accurate than existing methods both for home and work place predictions.