Persistence of BePop improvement during the pandemic

Determine whether, and to what extent, the improvement in alignment associated with Behavioral Population (BePop) calibration persists during the COVID-19 pandemic period.

Background

The BePop framework calibrates mobile-phone mobility data to demographic and behavioral reference distributions. To assess its longitudinal performance, the study compares BePop-weighted mobility profiles with an independent American Time Use Survey sample collected after the WHO pandemic declaration.

For the pandemic-period comparison, the ATUS reference sample is substantially smaller than the pre-pandemic sample. Although BePop produces a small relative improvement in Jensen–Shannon distance compared with the unweighted mobility distribution, bootstrap analysis yields large standard errors. Consequently, the paper leaves unresolved whether the observed improvement is persistent and how large it may be during the pandemic period.

References

The resulting large standard errors prevent us from determining whether, and to what extent, the improvement associated with BePop persists during the pandemic period.

— Behavioral calibration of mobile-phone GPS data for population-representative analyses  (2609.01042 - Girardini et al., 1 Sep 2026) in Results, subsection “BePop calibration on longitudinal mobility data,” paragraph “Population-level stability”