The temporal network of mobile phone users in Changchun municipality, Northeast China

Abstract

Mobile data are a feasible way for us to understand and reveal the feature of human mobility. However, it is extremely hard to have a fine-grained picture of large-scale mobility data, in particular at an urban scale. Here, we present a large-scale dataset of 2-million mobile phone users with time-varying locations, denoted as the temporal network of individuals, conducted by an open-data program in Changchun Municipality. To reveal human mobility across locations, we further construct the aggregated mobility network for each day by taking cellular base stations as nodes coupled by edges weighted by the total number of users’ movements between pairs of nodes. The resulting temporal network of mobile phone users and the dynamic, weighted and directed mobility network are released in simple formats for easy access to motivating research using this new and extensive data of human mobility.