Using mobile phone data to study dynamics of rural-urban mobility

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of human mobility is important for addressing challenges caused by phenomena that rely on mobility, such as infectious disease transmission. Although various data sources exist for modeling human mobility, most current sources face challenges of resolution, cost, scalability, and privacy. We used population-based mobile phone communication data to study the dynamics of rural-urban mobility. We have proposed a measure of popularity, which we used to identify the most and the least popular urban areas for rural-urban movement. The concept of hierarchical population mobility is also suggested that can be used to derive a high-level visualization of spatial population movement patterns. The results from our experiments are quite promising.