Urban Region Embeddings from Service-Specific Mobile Traffic Data

With the advent of modern <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4 \mathrm{G} / 5 \mathrm{G}$</tex> networks, mobile phone data collected by operators now includes detailed, servicespecific traffic information with high spatio-temporal resolution. In this paper, we explore the potential of such data for learning high-quality embeddings (representations) of urban regions. We propose a methodology that takes this data as input and employs a temporal convolutional network-based autoencoder, transformers, and learnable weighted sum models to extract key urban features. In the experimental evaluation, conducted using realworld datasets, we demonstrate that the embeddings generated by our methodology effectively capture urban characteristics. In particular, our embeddings are compared against those of a state-of-the-art multi-modal competitor across two downstream tasks, showing comparable quality. In general, our work highlights the potential and utility of service-specific mobile traffic data for urban research and the importance of making this data accessible to foster public innovation.