Blondel et al. RESEARCH 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, Universit´e In this paper, we review some advances made recently in the study of mobile catholique de Louvain, Avenue phone datasets. This area of research has emerged a decade ago, with the Georges Lemaitre, 4, 1348 increasing availability of large-scale anonymized datasets, and has grown into a Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium Full list of author information is stand-alone topic. We will survey the contributions made so far on the social available at the end of the article networks that can be constructed with such data, the study of personal mobility, geographical partitioning, urban planning, and help towards development as well as security and privacy issues. Keywords: mobile phone datasets; big data analysis 1 Introduction As the Internet has been the technological breakthrough of the ’90s, mobile phones have changed our communication habits in the first decade of the twenty-first cen- tury. In a few years, the world coverage of mobile phone subscriptions has raised from 12% of the world population in 2000 up to 96% in 2014 – 6.8 billion subscribers – corresponding to a penetration of 128% in the developed world and 90% in de- veloping countries [1]. Mobile communication has initiated the decline of landline use – decreasing both in developing and developed world since 2005 – and allows people to be connected even in the most remote places of the world. In short, mobile phones are ubiquitous.