Investigation of travel patterns using passive cellular phone data

Abstract

This paper presents methods for inferring selected travel patterns using passive cell-phone technology. The paper handles two issues that are related to the cellular phone technology: ‘zigzagging’ patterns that do not represent a movement, and track recording of the closest antenna location that serves the cell-phone, which means that the information of the location of the cell-phone itself is not accurate. The home and commuter location of each user is validated at the aggregate district level. The paper shows selected results that can be used for transportation analysis, including a comparison of the results to known models from preceding years.

Keywords::

• travel-patterns
• cellular-data
• travel habits
• cellular antennas

Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers for the several constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported in part by [grant number 1479/13] from the Israel Science Foundation administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences.