Related papers: Estimating Food Consumption and Poverty Indices wi…
Reliable statistical information is important to make political decisions on a sound basis and to help measure the impact of policies. Unfortunately, statistics offices in developing countries have scarce resources and statistical censuses…
High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for…
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to…
We provide systematic evidence on the potential for estimating household well-being from mobile phone data. Using data from four countries - Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Togo - we conduct parallel, standardized machine learning…
Can mobile phone data improve program targeting? By combining rich survey data from a "big push" anti-poverty program in Afghanistan with detailed mobile phone logs from program beneficiaries, we study the extent to which machine learning…
Innovative, real-time solutions are needed to address the mismatch between the demand for and supply of critical information to inform and motivate diet and health-related behavior change. Research suggests that interventions using mobile…
Through seven publications this dissertation shows how anonymized mobile phone data can contribute to the social good and provide insights into human behaviour on a large scale. The size of the datasets analysed ranges from 500 million to…
Socio-economic indicators provide context for assessing a country's overall condition. These indicators contain information about education, gender, poverty, employment, and other factors. Therefore, reliable and accurate information is…
Today, 95% of the global population has 2G mobile phone coverage and the number of individuals who own a mobile phone is at an all time high. Mobile phones generate rich data on billions of people across different societal contexts and have…
Recently, mobile operators in many developing economies have launched "Mobile Money" platforms that deliver basic financial services over the mobile phone network. While many believe that these services can improve the lives of the poor, a…
Purchase data from retail chains provide proxy measures of private household expenditure on items that are the most troublesome to collect in the traditional expenditure survey. Due to the sheer amount of proxy data, the bias due to…
Data volume grows explosively with the proliferation of powerful smartphones and innovative mobile applications. The ability to accurately and extensively monitor and analyze these data is necessary. Much concern in mobile data analysis is…
Statistics on migration flows are often derived from census data, which suffer from intrinsic limitations, including costs and infrequent sampling. When censuses are used, there is typically a time gap - up to a few years - between the data…
The aim of this study is to demostrate that mobile phone usage data can be used to make predictions and find the best classification method for credit scoring even if the dataset is small (2,503 customers). We use different classification…
The explosion of mobile phone communications in the last years occurs at a moment where data processing power increases exponentially. Thanks to those two changes in a global scale, the road has been opened to use mobile phone…
Fires, lights at night and mobile phone activity have been separately used as proxy indicators of human activity with high potential for measuring human development. In this preliminary report, we develop some tools and methodologies to…
This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data. Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks…
This paper describes how mobile phone data can guide government and public health authorities in determining the best course of action to control the COVID-19 pandemic and in assessing the effectiveness of control measures such as physical…
Understanding the social context of eating is crucial for promoting healthy eating behaviors. Multimodal smartphone sensor data could provide valuable insights into eating behavior, particularly in mobile food diaries and mobile health…
In this contribution we summarize insights on the geographical veracity of using mobile phone data to create (statistical) indicators. We focus on problems that persist with spatial allocation, spatial delineation and spatial aggregation of…