Impact of Natural and Social Events on Mobile Call Data Records – An Estonian Case Study

Abstract

Mobile Call Data Records (CDR) can be used for identifying human behavior. For example, researchers have studied mobile CDR to understand the social fabric of a country or for predicting the human mobility patterns. Additionally, CDR data has been combined with external data, for example, financial data to understand socio-economic patterns. In this paper, we study an anonymised CDR dataset provided by one of the biggest mobile operators in Estonia with two objectives. First, we explore the data to identify and interpret social network patterns. Our study points that mobile calling network is fragmented and sparse in Estonia. Second, we study the impact of natural and social events on mobile call activity. Our results show that these activities do have an impact on the calling activity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study, which has analysed the impact of varied types of events on mobile calling activity specifically in Estonian landscape.