An end-to-end statistical process with mobile network data for official statistics

Abstract

Mobile network data has been proven to provide a rich source of information in multiple statistical domains such as demography, tourism, urban planning, etc. However, the incorporation of this data source to the routinely production of official statistics is taking many efforts since a diversity of highly entangled issues (access, methodology, IT tools, quality, skills) must be solved beforehand. To do this, one-off studies with concrete data sets are not enough and a standard statistical production process must be put in place. We propose a concrete modular process structured into evolvable modules detaching the strongly technological layer underlying this data source from the necessary statistical analysis producing outputs of interest. This architecture follows the principles of the so-called ESS Reference Methodological Framework for Mobile Network Data. Each of these modules deals with a different aspect of this data source. We apply hidden Markov models for the geolocation of mobile devices, use a Bayesian approach on this model to disambiguate devices belonging to the same individual, compute aggregate numbers of individuals detected by a telecommunication network using probability theory, and model hierarchically the integration of auxiliary information from the telco market and official data to produce final estimates of the number of individuals across different territorial regions in the target population. A first simple illustrative proposal has been applied to synthetic data providing preliminary software tools and accuracy indicators monitoring the performance of the process. Currently, this exercise has been applied to the estimation of present population and origin-destination matrices. We present an illustrative example of the execution of these production modules comparing results with the simulated ground truth, thus assessing the performance of each production module.

KNOWCON 2021. Knowledge on Economics and Management: Conference Proceedings

“…Our methodological proposal is described in detail in Salgado et al (2020) and Salgado et al (2021) and represents an end-to-end statistical production process, starting from raw telecommunication data and producing the final population estimates. One of the central elements that we envisaged when we designed this framework was the functional modularity, thus, our methodological approach is structured based on the modularity and abstraction principles.…”

“…We estimate the parameters of the model and then compute the posterior location probabilities. An interested reader can find all mathematical details of this implementation in (Salgado et al, 2021).…”

“…the probability that device d belongs to an individual carrying two devices. The mathematical details of the computations can be found in (Salgado et al, 2021).…”

Using mobile money data and call detail records to explore the risks of urban migration in Tanzania

“…Over the years, several migration studies have identified the scarcity of reliable data available for quantitative analysis as a challenge to be overcome, particularly in developing countries [ 39 , 42 , 43 ]. Novel data types such as digital traces have been proposed as proxies for traditional census data; assisting in analysis of urban migration in countries where such surveying is challenging [ 44 ]. As previously detailed, mobile phones are now ubiquitous in Africa and Asia, with the billions of people carrying such devices.…”

KNOWCON 2022. Knowledge on Economics and Management: Conference Proceedings

“…In this work we concentrate on the proposal of executing in-situ production processes hopefully designed jointly by statistical officers and telecommunication experts (Salgado et al, 2021). Thus, our simulation tool will generate individual data: we shall work with network event data, i.e., data generated due to the interaction between a mobile device and the network: the timestamp, the cell ID of the network event, the timing advance variable.…”