Inferring human mobility patterns from anonymized mobile communication usage

Anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) contain positional information of large populations and therefore have been extensively analyzed to understand human mobility. Due to the temporally sparse and spatially coarse nature of the data, most of these studies have focused on primitive aspects of movements such as travel distance and speed. Incorporating underlying geographic information in these analyses would allow analysts to put these movements into context and to gain deeper insight into how metropolitan areas function. In this paper, we present a set of procedures for inferring mobile users' mobility patterns while retaining the context of underlying geography. We apply these methods to our case study on New York City anonymized CDRs. We find that our methods verify current areal semantics and commuting rush-hour patterns, and we also derive further implications regarding geographic, demographic, and other effects on human mobility.