Social Events in a Time-Varying Mobile Phone Graph

SARRAUTE, CARLOS; BREA, JORGE; BURRONI, JAVIER; WEHMUTH, KLAUS; ZIVIANI ARTUR; ALVAREZ HAMELIN, JOSÉ IGNACIO

Boston

Conferencia; NetMob 2015; 2015

MIT Media Lab

The large-scale study of human mobility has been signifi- cantly enhanced over the last decade by the massive use of mobile phones in urban populations [1, 2]. Studying the ac- tivity of mobile phones allows us, not only to infer social networks between individuals, but also to observe the move- ments of these individuals in space and time [4]. In this work, we investigate how these two related sources of in- formation can be integrated within the context of detecting and analyzing large social events. We show that large social events can be characterized not only by an anomalous in- crease in activity of the antennas in the neighborhood of the event, but also by an increase in social relationships of the attendants present in the event. Moreover, having detected a large social event via increased antenna activity, we can use the network connections to infer whether an unobserved user was present at the event. More precisely, we address the following three challenges: (i) automatically detecting large social events via increased antenna activity; (ii) character- izing the social cohesion of the detected event; and (iii) an- alyzing the feasibility of inferring whether unobserved users were in the event.