An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data

An intriguing open question is whether measurements made on Big Data recording human activities can yield us high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users' trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly "nowcast" the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory

Etnicidad y acumulación de capital humano en México Urbano

Se analiza la movilidad social y la acumulación de capital humano entre minorías étnicas en zonas urbanas de México, se exploran los cambios en el logro académico y la situación en el mercado laboral y se emplean datos de panel provenientes de la Encuesta sobre la Vida de la Familia Mexicana (MFxLS). Los resultados apuntan a importantes diferencias étnicas en los patrones de acumulación de capital humano, especialmente en la educación, donde los individuos no indígenas parecen acumular capital humano con mayor rapidez que los individuos de descendencia indígena. Además, características sociales y demográficas vinculadas con esos patrones de acumulación de capital humano parecen diferir entre los individuos de extracción indígena y los de extracción no indígena. En especial, en el caso de pueblos indígenas en zonas urbanas, la acumulación de capital humano y la acumulación de riqueza parecen obrar más como sustitutos que como complementos en el corto plazo.Social mobility, human capital accumulation, education, ethnic minorities, urban areas, Mexico

Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practice

Accessibility dynamics and regional cross-border cooperation (CBC) perspectives in the portuguese—spanish borderland

Accessibility plays a major role in achieving sustainable transport, and therefore urban and regional sustainability. The urban public transport system promotes mobility and realizes a large part of urban movements. Moreover, improving accessibility in order to promote sustainable transport requires the application of new concepts and indicators as a powerful tool in the process of creating a balanced urban transport system. In this regard, one of the main goals of this research is to present an overview of the relevant accessibility indicators and assessment of accessibility in regional Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) in order to transcendence challenges and obstacles for sustainable transportation in these regions along of Portuguese-Spanish border. This paper focuses on the accessibility of cross-border cooperation scenarios along the border regions of Alto Alentejo (Portugal) and Badajoz (Spain) where the Case Study Research Method (CSR) made it possible to recognize accessibility as a key factor in territorial success. Also, accessibility analysis can assess improvements as well as regional imbalances. In addition, this methodology can be used to identify missing links, which requires new investments enabling long-term sustainability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Does regional development explain international youth mobility? Spatial patterns and global/local determinants of the recent emigration of young Italians

In this essay, we tackle the issue of the international mobility of young Italians in relation to regional disparities. Our intention is to determine if and to what extent a relationship exists between regional development and the international mobility of young people. We analyze the international migration of Italian citizens aged 15-34 who left the country in the period 2010-2017 using several variables that reflect the varying conditions found in different NUTS 3-level regions in terms of economic dynamism, labor-market efficiency, social fragility, educational underdevelopment and spatial peripherality. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models show that the international mobility of young Italians is very much dependent on local conditions and affected by spatial differences. It is greatest in the most economically dynamic areas of the country, in border regions and in metropolitan areas, with factors relating to spatial proximity and peripherality, imbalances in local labor markets, and paucity of human capital proving particularly significant

Mobile Communication Signatures of Unemployment

The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to assess; thus the speed of which policies can be designed and evaluated is limited. However, recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data as an enabling methodology for demographic modeling and measurement. In this work, we investigate whether indicators extracted from mobile phone usage can reveal information about the socio-economical status of microregions such as districts (i.e., average spatial resolution < 2.7km). For this we examine anonymized mobile phone metadata combined with beneficiaries records from unemployment benefit program. We find that aggregated activity, social, and mobility patterns strongly correlate with unemployment. Furthermore, we construct a simple model to produce accurate reconstruction of district level unemployment from their mobile communication patterns alone. Our results suggest that reliable and cost-effective economical indicators could be built based on passively collected and anonymized mobile phone data. With similar data being collected every day by telecommunication services across the world, survey-based methods of measuring community socioeconomic status could potentially be augmented or replaced by such passive sensing methods in the future