Population estimation from mobile network traffic metadata

Abstract: Smartphones and other mobile devices are today pervasive across the globe. As an interesting side effect of the surge in mobile communications, mobile network operators can now easily collect a wealth of high-resolution data on the habits of large user populations. The information extracted from mobile network traffic data is very relevant in the context of population mapping: it provides a tool for the automatic and live estimation of population densities, overcoming the limitations of traditional data sources such as censuses and surveys. In this paper, we propose a new approach to infer population densities at urban scales, based on aggregated mobile network traffic metadata. Our approach allows estimating both static and dynamic populations, achieves a significant improvement in terms of accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art solutions in the literature, and is validated on different city scenarios.