Brief survey of Mobility Analyses based on Mobile Phone Datasets

This is a brief survey of the research performed by Grandata Labs in collaboration with numerous academic groups around the world on the topic of human mobility. A driving theme in these projects is to use and improve Data Science techniques to understand mobility, as it can be observed through the lens of mobile phone datasets. We describe applications of mobility analyses for urban planning, prediction of data traffic usage, building delay tolerant networks, generating epidemiologic risk maps and measuring the predictability of human mobility.

💡 Research Summary

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of research conducted by Grandata Labs in collaboration with numerous academic institutions worldwide, focusing on human mobility analysis using mobile phone datasets. The authors outline a unifying theme: leveraging large‑scale Call Detail Records (CDRs) and related telecom data to uncover patterns of movement, social interaction, and their practical applications. The survey is organized into five thematic sections.

1. Urban Planning – Studies such as