arXiv subjects

Martin Minnoni

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Minnoni.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

The wisdom of the few: Predicting collective success from individual behavior

Can we predict top-performing products, services, or businesses by only monitoring the behavior of a small set of individuals? Although most previous studies focused on the predictive power of "hub" individuals with many social contacts, which sources of customer behavioral data are needed to address this question remains unclear, mostly due to the scarcity of available datasets that simultaneously capture individuals' purchasing patterns and social interactions. Here, we address this question in a unique, large-scale dataset that combines individuals' credit-card purchasing history with their social and mobility traits across an entire nation. Surprisingly, we find that the purchasing history alone enables the detection of small sets of ``discoverers" whose early purchases offer reliable success predictions for the brick-and-mortar stores they visit. In contrast with the assumptions by most existing studies on word-of-mouth processes, the hubs selected by social network centrality are not consistently predictive of success. Our findings show that companies and organizations with access to large-scale purchasing data can detect the discoverers and leverage their behavior to anticipate market trends, without the need for social network data.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Secure Exchange of Digital Goods in a Decentralized Data Marketplace

We are tackling the problem of trading real-world private information using only cryptographic protocols and a public blockchain to guarantee honest transactions. In this project, we consider three types of agents --buyers, sellers and notaries-- interacting in a decentralized privacy-preserving data marketplace (dPDM) such as the Wibson data marketplace. This framework offers infrastructure and financial incentives for individuals to securely sell personal information while preserving personal privacy. Here we provide an efficient cryptographic primitive for the secure exchange of data in a dPDM, which occurs as an atomic operation wherein the data buyer gets access to the data and the data seller gets paid simultaneously.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Wibson: A Decentralized Data Marketplace

Our aim is for Wibson to be a blockchain-based, decentralized data marketplace that provides individuals a way to securely and anonymously sell information in a trusted environment. The combination of the Wibson token and blockchain-enabled smart contracts hopes to allow Data Sellers and Data Buyers to transact with each other directly while providing individuals the ability to maintain anonymity as desired. Wibson intends that its data marketplace will provide infrastructure and financial incentives for individuals to securely sell personal information without sacrificing personal privacy. Data Buyers receive information from willing and actively participating individuals with the benefit of knowing that the personal information should be accurate and current.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Brief survey of Mobility Analyses based on Mobile Phone Datasets

This is a brief survey of the research performed by Grandata Labs in collaboration with numerous academic groups around the world on the topic of human mobility. A driving theme in these projects is to use and improve Data Science techniques to understand mobility, as it can be observed through the lens of mobile phone datasets. We describe applications of mobility analyses for urban planning, prediction of data traffic usage, building delay tolerant networks, generating epidemiologic risk maps and measuring the predictability of human mobility.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Comparison of Feature Extraction Methods and Predictors for Income Inference

Patterns of mobile phone communications, coupled with the information of the social network graph and financial behavior, allow us to make inferences of users' socio-economic attributes such as their income level. We present here several methods to extract features from mobile phone usage (calls and messages), and compare different combinations of supervised machine learning techniques and sets of features used as input for the inference of users' income. Our experimental results show that the Bayesian method based on the communication graph outperforms standard machine learning algorithms using node-based features.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

A Bayesian Approach to Income Inference in a Communication Network

The explosion of mobile phone communications in the last years occurs at a moment where data processing power increases exponentially. Thanks to those two changes in a global scale, the road has been opened to use mobile phone communications to generate inferences and characterizations of mobile phone users. In this work, we use the communication network, enriched by a set of users' attributes, to gain a better understanding of the demographic features of a population. Namely, we use call detail records and banking information to infer the income of each person in the graph.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Uncovering the Spread of Chagas Disease in Argentina and Mexico

Chagas disease is a neglected disease, and information about its geographical spread is very scarse. We analyze here mobility and calling patterns in order to identify potential risk zones for the disease, by using public health information and mobile phone records. Geolocalized call records are rich in social and mobility information, which can be used to infer whether an individual has lived in an endemic area. We present two case studies in Latin American countries. Our objective is to generate risk maps which can be used by public health campaign managers to prioritize detection campaigns and target specific areas. Finally, we analyze the value of mobile phone data to infer long-term migrations, which play a crucial role in the geographical spread of Chagas disease.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Analyzing the Spread of Chagas Disease with Mobile Phone Data

We use mobile phone records for the analysis of mobility patterns and the detection of possible risk zones of Chagas disease in two Latin American countries. We show that geolocalized call records are rich in social and individual information, which can be used to infer whether an individual has lived in an endemic area. We present two case studies, in Argentina and in Mexico, using data provided by mobile phone companies from each country. The risk maps that we generate can be used by health campaign managers to target specific areas and allocate resources more effectively.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2017

Prepaid or Postpaid? That is the question. Novel Methods of Subscription Type Prediction in Mobile Phone Services

In this paper we investigate the behavioural differences between mobile phone customers with prepaid and postpaid subscriptions. Our study reveals that (a) postpaid customers are more active in terms of service usage and (b) there are strong structural correlations in the mobile phone call network as connections between customers of the same subscription type are much more frequent than those between customers of different subscription types. Based on these observations we provide methods to detect the subscription type of customers by using information about their personal call statistics, and also their egocentric networks simultaneously. The key of our first approach is to cast this classification problem as a problem of graph labelling, which can be solved by max-flow min-cut algorithms. Our experiments show that, by using both user attributes and relationships, the proposed graph labelling approach is able to achieve a classification accuracy of $\sim 87\%$, which outperforms by $\sim 7\%$ supervised learning methods using only user attributes. In our second problem we aim to infer the subscription type of customers of external operators. We propose via approximate methods to solve this problem by using node attributes, and a two-ways indirect inference method based on observed homophilic structural correlations. Our results have straightforward applications in behavioural prediction and personal marketing.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Harnessing Mobile Phone Social Network Topology to Infer Users Demographic Attributes

We study the structure of the social graph of mobile phone users in the country of Mexico, with a focus on demographic attributes of the users (more specifically the users' age). We examine assortativity patterns in the graph, and observe a strong age homophily in the communications preferences. We propose a graph based algorithm for the prediction of the age of mobile phone users. The algorithm exploits the topology of the mobile phone network, together with a subset of known users ages (seeds), to infer the age of remaining users. We provide the details of the methodology, and show experimental results on a network GT with more than 70 million users. By carefully examining the topological relations of the seeds to the rest of the nodes in GT, we find topological metrics which have a direct influence on the performance of the algorithm. In particular we characterize subsets of users for which the accuracy of the algorithm is 62% when predicting between 4 age categories (whereas a pure random guess would yield an accuracy of 25%). We also show that we can use the probabilistic information computed by the algorithm to further increase its inference power to 72% on a significant subset of users.

cs.SI↗