Individual-Level Trip Detection using Sparse Call Detail Record Data based on Supervised Statistical Learning

Despite a large body of literature related to trip detection using Call Detail Record (CDR) data, the fundamental understanding of the limitations of the data is lacking and, particularly, its sparse nature is not well addressed in existing work. This paper develops a conceptual framework to make explicit distinction between telecommunication patterns captured by CDRs and travel patterns that are of interest to the transportation community. Motivated by the over-reliance of existing trip detection methodology on heuristics and assumptions, the authors propose to use data fusion to form labeled data for supervised statistical learning. In the absence of complementary data, this can be done by extracting labeled observation from more granular cellular data access records and extracting feature vectors from voice-call and SMS records. The proposed approach is demonstrated, using real-word CDR data from a Chinese city, through inferring whether there exists a hidden visit between two consecutive visits observed from CDR data. Logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) are used to develop statistical classification models, and all show significant improvement over the naïve rule that assumes no hidden visit. This study provides a deeper understanding on how the authors can, and should, extract trips in human mobility from CDRs in telecommunication. The proposed data fusion approach offers a flexible and systematic way to make inference of individual mobility patterns, even when only CDR data is available.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ40 Standing Committee on Travel Survey Methods. Alternate title: Supervised Statistical Learning for Individual-Level Trip Detection using Sparse Call Detail Record Data
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Zhao, Zhan
    • Zhao, Jinhua
    • Koutsopoulos, Haris N
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2016

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 18p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01593369
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 16-4386
  • Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 9 2016 4:06PM