Enriching Census Data with Mobile Positioning Data

A person's hands operate a smart phone

Journal: Science Matters  |  MPC Members: Di Zhu and David Van Riper

  • The enriched census data incorporates human visitations extracted from large-scale mobile positioning data 
  • Identified and validated the potential home locations of 3.58 million anonymous mobile phone users across seven U.S. metropolitan areas
  • Home detection results were used to enrich the socio-demographic profile of the places users visited
  • The proposed data generation framework is adaptive, allowing future integration of diverse socio-demographic features at varying spatial and temporal scales
  • This visitor-based census bridges the gap between conventional census and mobile phone data