Better coverage, better outcomes? Mapping mobile network data to official statistics using satellite imagery and radio propagation modelling

Abstract

Mobile sensing data has become a popular data source for geo-spatial analysis, however, mapping it accurately to other sources of information such as statistical data remains a challenge. Popular mapping approaches such as point allocation or voronoi tessellation provide only crude approximations of the mobile network coverage as they do not consider holes, overlaps and within-cell heterogeneity. More elaborate mapping schemes often require additional proprietary data operators are highly reluctant to share. In this paper, I use human settlement information extracted from publicly available satellite imagery in combination with stochastic radio propagation modelling techniques to account for that. I investigate in a simulation study and a real-world application on unemployment estimates in Senegal whether better coverage approximations lead to better outcome predictions. The good news is: it does not have to be complicated.

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• On the use of human mobility proxy for the modeling of epidemics
• D4D-Senegal: The Second Mobile Phone Data for Development Challenge
• Assessing reliable human mobility patterns from higher-order memory in mobile communications
• Exploiting Cellular Data for Disease Containment and Information Campaigns Strategies in Country-Wide Epidemics
• Can mobile usage predict illiteracy in a developing country?

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Intercensal updating using structure-preserving methods and satellite imagery
• Predicting cell phone adoption metrics using satellite imagery