Mobile phone data's potential for informing infrastructure planning in developing countries

Abstract

High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for infrastructure planning such as being updated in real-time, including mobility information and recording visitors' activity. We combine various data sets from Senegal to evaluate mobile phone data's potential to replace insufficient census data for infrastructure planning in developing countries. As an applied case, we test their ability at predicting domestic electricity consumption. We show that, contrary to common belief, average mobile phone activity does not correlate well with population density. However, it can provide better electricity consumption estimates than basic census data. More importantly, we use curve and network clustering techniques to enhance the accuracy of the predictions, to recover good population mapping potential and to reduce the collection of required data to substantially smaller samples.