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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Estimating the presence of people in buildings using Call Detail Records

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

As geographic data about individual movement become increasingly available, they open LIP the possibility of understanding and modeling urban mobility patterns. While no all-encompassing dataset regarding mobility is available, this study explores how Call Detail Records (CDRs), a highly ubiquitous dataset, can be leveraged to create models that can reproduce mobility patterns observed from time consuming, capital-intensive and infrequent travel surveys. While mechanisms have been proposed for reproducing particular characteristics of individual mobility, this is the first attempt to generate all mobility patterns at fine spatial and temporal scales at the level of individual buildings. Two shortcomings of any dataset include spatial uncertainty at very high resolution and the presence of high-fidelity traces for only a fraction of the population. While the proposed model addressed the former to some extent by providing high accuracy counts at the level of census tracts, a separate method has been explored to address this along with the latter phenomenon. To achieve this, the study leverages hyper-local datasets such as building footprints and places of interest. In the absence of primary datasets, the study is able to provide a model to estimate of the presence of people at the level of individual buildings. Hence, this study provides a pipeline to proceed from high fidelity location traces from a fraction of the population to building level occupancy profiles using fairly ubiquitous data sources.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Gupta, Siddharth, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Marta C. González.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111437
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111437

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Gupta, Siddharth, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Estimating the presence of people in buildings using Call Detail Records. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111437