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Exploring the potential of phone call data to characterize the relationship between social network and travel behavior
Social network contacts have significant influence on individual travel behavior. However, transport models rarely consider social interaction. One of the reasons is the difficulty to properly model social influence based on the limited data available. Non-conventional, passively collected data sour...
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Published in: | Transportation (Dordrecht) 2015-07, Vol.42 (4), p.647-668 |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Citations: | Items that this one cites Items that cite this one |
Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | Social network contacts have significant influence on individual travel behavior. However, transport models rarely consider social interaction. One of the reasons is the difficulty to properly model social influence based on the limited data available. Non-conventional, passively collected data sources, such as Twitter, Facebook or mobile phones, provide large amounts of data containing both social interaction and spatiotemporal information. The analysis of such data opens an opportunity to better understand the influence of social networks on travel behavior. The main objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between travel behavior and social networks using mobile phone data. A huge dataset containing billions of registers has been used for this study. The paper analyzes the nature of co-location events and frequent locations shared by social network contacts, aiming not only to provide understanding on why users share certain locations, but also to quantify the degree in which the different types of locations are shared. Locations have been classified as frequent (
home
,
work
and
other
) and non-frequent. A novel approach to identify co-location events based on the intersection of users’ mobility models has been proposed. Results show that
other
locations different from
home
and
work
are frequently associated to social interaction. Additionally, the importance of non-frequent locations in co-location events is shown. Finally, the potential application of the data analysis results to improve activity-based transport models and assess transport policies is discussed. |
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ISSN: | 0049-4488 1572-9435 |
DOI: | 10.1007/s11116-015-9594-1 |