Researchers at the University of Washington have determined that accurate and timely estimates of population characteristics are a critical input to social and economic research and policy. In an article appearing in the journal Science (November 27 issue), the researchers show that an individual’s past history of mobile phone use can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic status. The University’s Joshua Blumenstock and Gabriel Cadamuro and Robert On with the University of California were the authors of the paper. The paper points out that in industrialized economies, novel sources of data are enabling new approaches to demographic profiling, but in developing countries, fewer sources of big data exist.
“We show that an individual’s past history of mobile phone use can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic status,” finds the paper. They also demonstrate that the predicted attributes of millions of individuals can accurately reconstruct the distribution of wealth of an entire nation or to infer the asset distribution of micro regions (administrative territorial entities) composed of just a few households. In areas where censuses and household surveys are rare, mobile phones can be used to create an option for gathering local and timely information and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Although most comparable sources of big data are scarce in the world’s poorest nations, mobile phones are a notable exception. The paper says they are used by 3.4 billion individuals worldwide and are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in developing regions. This is helpful, the paper says, because mobile phone data capture rich information, not only on the frequency and timing of communication events but also reflecting the structure of an individual’s social network, patterns of travel and location choice and histories of consumption and expenditure. The full paper with maps and diagrams can be read on Science’s website.
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