The Silence of the Cantons: Estimating Villages Socioeconomic Status Through Mobile Phones Data

Abstract

The use of cellphones has deeply influenced the way how people communicate and live everyday. Because of mobile phones ubiquity, the geolocated information recorded by every activity carried on with them has been used in numerous studies in topics related to human mobility and their relation with socioeconomic indicators. Socioeconomic indicators like health, education and poverty provide insights about the welfare of a region. Subsequently, such geolocated records with their inherent fine granularity are key for a local government in order to take decisions over a region and promote their development. Analysis of CDRs to approximate these indicators has been mainly done over developed and emerging countries like India and Brazil, but there is still a lack of studies over countries in means of development. In the present study, we propose a method to predict three socioeconomic indices at a high granularity, in the context of a developing country. Our study uses the volume of mobile phones calls and SMS (Short Message Service) messages located in a province of Ecuador over different periods of time. Our results demonstrate that activities from mobile phones are an effective and accessible input for determining the economic status of a developing country's canton. We show that a high mobile phones activity frequency is linked to a population with higher incomes and education level.

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