Advancing home location detection and exploring socio-demographic representativeness of new forms of mobile phone data

Keywords: spatial big data, mobile phone data, home location detection, socio-demographic representativeness
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

Mobile phone data offer enormous potential by virtue of the data volume available, the wide population coverage and the spatial and temporal details provided. However, uncertainty in the geographic and socio-demographic representation means there is an ethical risk that underlying biases in the datasets could impact results and present biased evidence. In particular, underlying social inequalities in access to and use of mobile phones may be reproduced through the analysis, skewing resources towards already-advantaged social groups. This research seeks to establish a sound basis to use these new forms of data by addressing the issues of bias and representativeness in mobile phone data directly using two independent third party mobile phone datasets. The overarching objective of this research is to advance methods in home location detection, using high resolution land use data, for new forms of mobile phone data and compare resulting estimates on home location to public and private socio-demographic data. The research allows us to identify potential biases in mobile phone data which arise through uneven population coverage as well as the variations which arise between different commercial providers of the data. Results show that the distribution of over 100,000 mobile phone users estimated across the Glasgow City Region in 2020 are comparable to socio-demographic population coverage presented by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (public) and the Acorn consumer classification (CACI) (private). Findings are important as they present a fundamental foundation for any policy recommendation which are developed from the analysis of this novel data source.