Beyond Aggregates: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Individual Mobility and Traffic Dependencies

Understanding mobile-user behavior requires joint modeling of mobility and traffic, as data consumption is shaped by where, when, and how users travel. Despite this clear intuition, most studies still treat the two in isolation, missing the intricate dependencies between them at the individual level. This paper propose a novel approach that explicitly captures the interplay between traffic and mobility behaviors using fine-grained mobile datasets. Using week-long eXtended Data Records (XDRs), we identify 13 interpretable features and pinpoint the mobility traits that truly drive traffic variation. These insights support a privacy-preserving user abstraction that represents each timeline as a sequence of discrete mobility–traffic states, capturing temporal dynamics and heterogeneity while generalizing across regions. We then introduce a probabilistic likelihood model that scores any mobility–traffic pairing, enabling cross-modality prediction and statistically sound fusion of fragmented logs. Experiments on four provincial datasets covering 1.3 million Chilean users show that the model reliably separates plausible from implausible behavior and generalizes from dense urban cores to mixed rural–urban contexts. The framework is descriptive, generative, and transferable, paving the way for anomaly detection, personalized QoE adaptation, and realistic network simulation.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Published
2025-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/mswim67937.2025.11309071
Primary Topic
Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

Beyond Aggregates: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Individual Mobility and Traffic Dependencies

Anne Josiane Kouam, Mariano G. Beiró, Leo Ferres, Luca Pappalardo et al.
Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
article

Beyond Aggregates: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Individual Mobility and Traffic Dependencies

Anne Josiane Kouam, Mariano G. Beiró, Leo Ferres, Luca Pappalardo, Aline Carneiro Viana
article en

Abstract

Understanding mobile-user behavior requires joint modeling of mobility and traffic, as data consumption is shaped by where, when, and how users travel. Despite this clear intuition, most studies still treat the two in isolation, missing the intricate dependencies between them at the individual level. This paper propose a novel approach that explicitly captures the interplay between traffic and mobility behaviors using fine-grained mobile datasets. Using week-long eXtended Data Records (XDRs), we identify 13 interpretable features and pinpoint the mobility traits that truly drive traffic variation. These insights support a privacy-preserving user abstraction that represents each timeline as a sequence of discrete mobility–traffic states, capturing temporal dynamics and heterogeneity while generalizing across regions. We then introduce a probabilistic likelihood model that scores any mobility–traffic pairing, enabling cross-modality prediction and statistically sound fusion of fragmented logs. Experiments on four provincial datasets covering 1.3 million Chilean users show that the model reliably separates plausible from implausible behavior and generalizes from dense urban cores to mixed rural–urban contexts. The framework is descriptive, generative, and transferable, paving the way for anomaly detection, personalized QoE adaptation, and realistic network simulation.

Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (FR), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (AR), Scuola Normale Superiore (IT), Universidad del Desarrollo del Estado de Puebla (MX)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 24%
Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.

Beyond Aggregates: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Individual Mobility and Traffic Dependencies — Anne Josiane Kouam, Mariano G. Beiró, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS