Predicting location using mobile phone calls

Abstract

Location prediction using mobile phone traces has attracted increasing attention. Owing to the irregular user mobility patterns, it still remains challenging to predict user location. Our empirical study in this paper shows that the call patterns are strongly correlated with co-locate patterns (i.e., visiting the same cell tower at the same period), and the call patterns mainly affect user short-time mobility. On top of these findings, we propose NextMe - - a novel scheme to enhance the location prediction accuracy by leveraging the social interplay revealed in the cellular calls. To identify when the social interplay will affect user mobility, we introduce the concepts of the Critical Call Pattern (CCP), and the Critical Call (CC). We validate NextMe with the MIT Reality Mining dataset, involving 350,000-hour activity logs of 106 persons, and 112,508 cellular calls. Experimental results show that the social interplay significantly improves the accuracy. © 2012 Authors.