Mobile Phone Data Statistics as Proxy Indicator for Regional Economic Activity Assessment

摘要

The mobile data analysis is an authoritative source of information for problems solving in the fields of human activity recognition, population dynamics, tourism, transport planning, traffics measuring, public administration and other activities and could be the source for valuable information as a proxy indicator. One of the obstacles to user data from mobile operators is compliance to the General Data Protection Regulation, so the development of data analytics approach that protects personal data without a necessity to identify mobility of particular persons was developed, that still provides economically relevant data. In the present research, the method for the economic activity assessment based on mobile phone data statistics of any analysed region has been developed. The data of person activity was aggregated at the area of each base station by the 15 minutes interval, where the activity is defined as the number of outgoing and incoming calls, sent and received short message service (SMS), as well the number of the unique users. The Latvian counties have used as a case study where regions were grouped into the similar categories and compared for two periods: 2015 - 2016 and 2017 by the economic activity efficiency with particular attention to the seasonality effect for mobile phone activities in counties. It was concluded, that the economic activity of counties can be estimated and in the particular case positive dynamics of regional development has been detected.