Analysis on Urban Collective Call Behavior to Earthquake

Despite recent advances in uncovering the quantitative features of human activities in routine life, human call behavior in earthquake is still less clear. Taking the data of mobile phone records produced by the users in 3 days in the northwest of China, we systematically analyze the characteristics of mobile phone call patterns to earthquake by using ratio analysis and degree distribution method. We find that as a whole, earthquake brings about the significant growth in the indices of data volume, phone volume, duration, distant call volume and local call volume, etc. And the duration of the calls has a significant increase than that of the number of the calls. From the temporal perspective, we discover that at the first 2 hours that earthquake took place, people tend to make much more local calls rather than distant calls. However, unlike the local call, the big volume of distant calls last a whole day except for 3 hours in the afternoon. More interesting, although there is the biggest data volume and phone volume in the day that earthquake happened, only those who contact less than 10 phone number dominate the biggest data volume and phone volume. This demonstrates the pattern difference between the business calls and the private calls. The in-depth understanding of human behavior in emergency help us understand many complex socio-economic phenomena, and find applications in public opinion monitoring, disease control, transportation system design, calling center services, and information recommendation.