A novel approach to estimate human space-time path based on mobile phone call records

The spatio-temporal behavior of people is of significant importance for a variety of social and economic applications. The wide use of mobile phone provides a new way to obtain the space and time information of citizens by means of the positioning mechanism of cellular network. In the conceptual framework of time geography, this kind of data could be used for generalize a space-time path of human movement behavior. However, phone call records for every user are very parse, so it calls for reasonable estimation methodologies, and few pilot studies could utilize the real dataset to put it into practice. This paper proposed a statistical approach to estimate a person´s space-time path. Location Stability Index is defined to measure the regularity and mobility stability of a person. The approach is adaptive to the spatio-temporal distribution of calling activity, showing good robustness and flexibility for different kinds of users. The location stability concept is also applied to analyze real data performance and parameter determination. We realized the algorithm and did experiments on real cell phone call dataset of a Chinese city, and the results showed that our methodology performed well according to the real situation.