Money Walks: Implicit Mobility Behavior and Financial Well-Being

Traditional financial decision systems (e.g. credit) had to rely on explicit individual traits like age, gender, job type, and marital status, while being oblivious to spatio-temporal mobility or the habits of the individual involved. Emerging trends in geo-aware and mobile payment systems, and the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-08, Vol.10 (8), p.e0136628-e0136628
Main Authors: Singh, Vivek Kumar, Bozkaya, Burcin, Pentland, Alex
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animals
Artificial intelligence
Cellular telephones
Consumption (Economics)
Credit cards
Credit scoring
Data management
Data mining
Demographics
Demography
Ecology
Economic analysis
Elasticity
Exploration
Financial analysis
Financial institutions
Financial management
Foraging behavior
Forecasts and trends
Human behavior
Humans
Influence
Mobile commerce
Mobility
Models, Economic
Payment systems
Privacy
Shopping
Trends
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Summary:Traditional financial decision systems (e.g. credit) had to rely on explicit individual traits like age, gender, job type, and marital status, while being oblivious to spatio-temporal mobility or the habits of the individual involved. Emerging trends in geo-aware and mobile payment systems, and the resulting "big data," present an opportunity to study human consumption patterns across space and time. Taking inspiration from animal behavior studies that have reported significant interconnections between animal spatio-temporal "foraging" behavior and their life outcomes, we analyzed a corpus of hundreds of thousands of human economic transactions and found that financial outcomes for individuals are intricately linked with their spatio-temporal traits like exploration, engagement, and elasticity. Such features yield models that are 30% to 49% better at predicting future financial difficulties than the comparable demographic models.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0136628