Human Mobility and Predictability enriched by Social Phenomena Information

Abstract: The massive amounts of geolocation data collected from mobile phone records has sparked an ongoing effort to understand and predict the mobility patterns of human beings. In this work, we study the extent to which social phenomena are reflected in mobile phone data, focusing in particular in the cases of urban commute and major sports events. We illustrate how these events are reflected in the data, and show how information about the events can be used to improve predictability in a simple model for a mobile phone user's location.