Predictability of Mobile Phone Associations



AbstractPrediction and understanding of human behavior is of high importance in many modern applications and research areas ranging from context-aware services, wireless resource allocation to social sciences. In this study we collect a novel dataset using standard mobile phones and analyze how the predictability of mobile sensors, acting as proxies for humans, change with time scale and sensor type such as GSM and WLAN. Applying recent information theoretic methods, it is demonstrated that an upper bound on predictability is relatively high for all sensors given the complete history (typically above 90%). The relation between time scale and the predictability bound is examined for GSM and WLAN sensors, and both are found to have predictable and non-trivial behavior even on quite short time scales. The analysis provides valuable insight into aspects such as time scale and spatial quantization, state representation, and general behavior. This is of vital interest in the development of context-aware services which rely on forecasting based on mobile phone sensors.
TypeConference paper [With referee]
Conference21st European Conference on Machine Learning
EditorsMining Ubiquitous and Social Environments Workshop (MUSE2010)
Year2010    Month September    pp. 91-105
Publication linkhttp://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/ws/muse2010/proceedings.pdf#page=91
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Intelligent Signal Processing