Mining and Modeling Large Scale Cell Phone Data

Cell phones are ubiquitous in modern life and the call records collected by network operators are a powerful tool to study the behavior of cell phone users, and how those users use network resources, at previously impossible-to-achieve scales. In this paper, the authors report on results from the analysis of billions of call records at a large cellular operator and they describe how mining that data leads to new and extremely exciting research problems in the areas of social network analysis, privacy, and economics. They consider three kinds of data, namely social network data (who calls whom, how often, etc), location and mobility data (who is where) and spectrum data (who uses how much spectrum in which cell).