Behavioral entropy of a cellular phone user

Abstract

The increase of advanced service offered by cellular networks draws lots of interest from researchers to study the networks and phone user behavior. With the evolution of Voice over IP, cellular phone usage is expected to increase exponentially. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of cellular phone users and identify behavior signatures based on their calling patterns. We quantify and infer the relationship of a person’s randomness levels using information entropy based on the location of the user, time of the call, inter-connected time, and duration of the call. We use real-life call logs of 94 mobile phone users collected at MIT by the Reality Mining Project group for a period of nine months. We are able to capture the user’s calling behavior on various parameters and interesting relationship between randomness levels in individual’s life and calling pattern using correlation coefficients and factor analysis. This study extends our understanding of cellular phone user behavior and characterizes cellular phone users in forms of randomness level.