High resolution population estimates from telecommunications data

Abstract

Spatial variations in the distribution and composition of populations inform urban development, health-risk analyses, disaster relief, and more. Despite the broad relevance and importance of such data, acquiring local census estimates in a timely and accurate manner is challenging because population counts can change rapidly, are often politically charged, and suffer from logistical and administrative challenges. These limitations necessitate the development of alternative or complementary approaches to population mapping. In this paper we develop an explicit connection between telecommunications data and the underlying population distribution of Milan, Italy. We go on to test the scale invariance of this connection and use telecommunications data in conjunction with high-resolution census data to create easily updated and potentially real time population estimates in time and space.

Evaluating Risk to People and Property for Aircraft Emergency Landing Planning

“…Researchers have established connections between the underlying population distribution obtained from census estimates with telecommunications data [19]. A recent study demonstrated that "presence" information (i.e., an estimate of the number of users in a certain space based on their last interaction with the mobile network) can provide better correlation with census data [7].…”

“…Spatial and temporal aggregation combined with unit-of-measure blurring are used for privacy and proprietary reasons [19]. Database entries are summarized next (see footnote §), including definitions of associated symbols.…”

“…Even though activity levels diminish, night-time mobile activity combined with land use data has been used to estimate occupancy or population using census data as a ground-truth comparison [19]. Khodabandelou et al [7] proposed the use of mobile activity and census data to provide a real-time population estimate.…”

“…This option follows [19], which reports that the call-out feature gave the highest correlation with population data from traditional census databases. Figure 7 shows heat map trends for other mobile activity features over the same after-match time interval as call-out in Fig.…”

Population Estimation in Singapore Based on Remote Sensing and Open Data

“…A literature review on the subject has shown that Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System as an alternative has been long recognized as a costeffective way of getting population information (Wang et al 2016, Greger 2015, Martin et al .2015, Jia et al 2014, Douglass et al 2015. In general, areal interpolation and statistical modeling methods have * Corresponding author been categorized in terms of their aim and required data.…”