Blondel et al. EPJ Data Science (2015)4:10 DOI 10.1140/epjds/s13688-015-0046-0 R E V I E W Open Access A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis Vincent D Blondel1*, Adeline Decuyper1 and Gautier Krings1,2 *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1Department of Applied Mathematics, Université catholique In this paper, we review some advances made recently in the study of mobile phone de Louvain, Avenue Georges datasets. This area of research has emerged a decade ago, with the increasing Lemaitre, 4, Louvain-La-Neuve, availability of large-scale anonymized datasets, and has grown into a stand-alone 1348, Belgium Full list of author information is topic. We survey the contributions made so far on the social networks that can be available at the end of the article constructed with such data, the study of personal mobility, geographical partitioning, urban planning,andhelp towards development as well as security and privacy issues. Keywords: mobile phone datasets; big data analysis; data mining; social networks; temporal networks; geographical networks 1 Introduction As the Internet has been the technological breakthrough of the ’s, mobile phones have changed our communication habits in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In a few years, the world coverage of mobile phone subscriptions has raised from % of the world population in up to % in - . billion subscribers - corresponding to a penetration of % in the developed world and % in developing countries []. Mobile communication has initiated the decline of landline use - decreasing both in developing and developed world since - and allows people to be connected even in the most remote places of the world.