An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data

An intriguing open question is whether measurements derived from Big Data recording human activities can yield high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users’ trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly “nowcast” the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  International Journal of Data Science and Analysis

• Publication date

  2016-03-16

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Sociology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s41060-016-0013-2arXiv 1606.06279
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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