Using graphical features to improve Demographic prediction from smart phone data

Abstract

Demographic information such as gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, disabilities, employment, and socio-economic status are important in the area of social science, survey and marketing. But it is difficult to obtain the demographic information from users due to reluctance of users to participate and low response rate. Through automated demographics prediction from smart phone sensor data, researchers can obtain this valuable information in a nonintrusive and cost-effective manner. We approach the problem of demographic prediction, namely, classification of gender, age group and job type, through the use of a graphical feature based framework. The framework represents information collected from sensor networks as graphs, extracts useful and relevant graphical features, and predicts demographic information. We evaluated our approach on the Nokia Mobile Phone dataset for the three classification tasks: gender, age-group and job-type. Our approach produced comparable results with most of the state of the art methods while having the additional advantage of general applicability to sensor networks without using sophisticated and application-specific feature generation techniques, background knowledge and special techniques to address class imbalance.