arXiv subjects

Simone Centellegher

Publications and source records attributed to Simone Centellegher.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Behavioral calibration of mobile-phone GPS data for population-representative analyses

Mobile phone mobility data have transformed the study of human behavior, but demographic and behavioral biases can compromise their representativeness and distort population-level inference. Existing calibration approaches primarily address demographic and geographic representativeness, leaving behavioral discrepancies largely uncorrected. Here we introduce the Behavioral Population (BePop) framework, which jointly calibrates mobility data to representative demographic and behavioral distributions using census data and time-use surveys. BePop embeds mobility sequences into behavioral profiles and estimates person-level weights that align both population composition and daily activity patterns. Across three U.S. metropolitan areas, the framework consistently improves agreement between GPS-derived mobility and representative behavioral distributions, including time allocation, activity transitions, and mobility motifs. Calibration also substantially alters downstream mobility indicators, demonstrating that behavioral biases can propagate into commonly used mobility measures. Our results establish behavioral representativeness as a critical complement to demographic calibration and provide a general framework for population-representative mobility inference.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Unifying points of interest taxonomies: mapping OpenStreetMap tags to the Foursquare category system

The heterogeneity of Point of Interest (POI) taxonomies is a persistent challenge for the integration of urban datasets and the development of location-based services. OpenStreetMap (OSM) adopts a flexible, community-driven tagging system, while Foursquare (FS) relies on a curated hierarchical structure. Here we present an openly available benchmark and mapping framework that aligns OSM tags with the FS taxonomy. This resource integrates the richness of community-driven OSM data with the hierarchical structure of FS, enabling reproducible and interoperable urban analytics. The dataset is complemented by an evaluation of embedding and LLM-based alignment strategies and a pipeline that supports scalable updates as OSM evolves. Together, these elements provide both a robust reference resource and a practical tool for the community. Our approach is structured around three components: the construction of a manually curated benchmark as a gold standard, the evaluation of pretrained text embedding models for semantic alignment between OSM tags and FS categories, and an LLM-based refinement stage that enhances robustness and adaptability. The proposed methodology provides a scalable and reproducible solution for taxonomy unification, with direct applications to urban analytics, mobility studies, and smart city services.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Mixing Individual and Collective Behaviours to Predict Out-of-Routine Mobility

Predicting human displacements is crucial for addressing various societal challenges, including urban design, traffic congestion, epidemic management, and migration dynamics. While predictive models like deep learning and Markov models offer insights into individual mobility, they often struggle with out-of-routine behaviours. Our study introduces an approach that dynamically integrates individual and collective mobility behaviours, leveraging collective intelligence to enhance prediction accuracy. Evaluating the model on millions of privacy-preserving trajectories across three US cities, we demonstrate its superior performance in predicting out-of-routine mobility, surpassing even advanced deep learning methods. Spatial analysis highlights the model's effectiveness near urban areas with a high density of points of interest, where collective behaviours strongly influence mobility. During disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic, our model retains predictive capabilities, unlike individual-based models. By bridging the gap between individual and collective behaviours, our approach offers transparent and accurate predictions, crucial for addressing contemporary mobility challenges.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Job loss disrupts individuals' mobility and their exploratory patterns

In recent years, human mobility research has discovered universal patterns capable of describing how people move. These regularities have been shown to partly depend on individual and environmental characteristics (e.g., gender, rural/urban, country). In this work, we show that life-course events, such as job loss, can disrupt individual mobility patterns. Adversely affecting individuals' well-being and potentially increasing the risk of social and economic inequalities, we show that job loss drives a significant change in the exploratory behaviour of individuals with changes that intensify over time since job loss. Our findings shed light on the dynamics of employment-related behavior at scale, providing a deeper understanding of key components in human mobility regularities. These drivers can facilitate targeted social interventions to support the most vulnerable populations.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Adaptation of Student Behavioural Routines during COVID-19: A Multimodal Approach

One population group that had to significantly adapt and change their behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic is students. While previous studies have extensively investigated the impact of the pandemic on their psychological well-being and academic performance, limited attention has been given to their activity routines. In this work, we analyze students' behavioural changes by examining qualitative and quantitative differences in their daily routines between two distinct periods (2018 and 2020). Using an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) that captures multimodal self-reported data on students' activity, locations and sociality, we apply Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to extract meaningful behavioural components, and quantified the variations in behaviour between students in 2018 and 2020. Surprisingly, despite the presence of COVID-19 restrictions, we find minimal changes in the activities performed by students, and the diversity of activities also remains largely unaffected. Leveraging the richness of the data at our disposal, we discovered that activities adaptation to the pandemic primarily occurred in the location and sociality dimensions.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends

A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the question of tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study, we use mobile phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyze the weekly allocation of time invested in maintaining transient relationships. We find that more relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater proportion of them receiving more contact during these days of the week in the long term. The smaller group of relationships that receive more phone calls during the weekend tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a sorting process by which some ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and vice versa, mostly in the first half of the relationship. This process also carries more information about the ultimate lifetime of a tie than the part of the week when the relationship started, which suggests an early evaluation period that leads to a decision on how to allocate time to different types of transient ties.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Inequality, Crime and Public Health: A Survey of Emerging Trends in Urban Data Science

Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Play&Go Corporate: An End-to-End Solution for Facilitating Urban Cyclability

Mobility plays a fundamental role in modern cities. How citizens experience the urban environment, access city core services, and participate in city life, strongly depends on its mobility organization and efficiency. The challenges that municipalities face are very ambitious: on the one hand, administrators must guarantee their citizens the right to mobility and to easily access local services; on the other hand, they need to minimize the economic, social, and environmental costs of the mobility system. Municipalities are increasingly facing problems of traffic congestion, road safety, energy dependency and air pollution, and therefore encouraging a shift towards sustainable mobility habits based on active mobility is of central importance. Active modes, such as cycling, should be particularly encouraged, especially for local recurrent journeys (e.g., home--to--school, home--to--work). In this context, addressing and mitigating commuter-generated traffic requires engaging public and private stakeholders through innovative and collaborative approaches that focus not only on supply (e.g., roads and vehicles) but also on transportation demand management. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution, called Play&Go Corporate, for enabling urban cyclability and its concrete exploitation in the realization of a home-to-work sustainable mobility campaign (i.e., Bike2Work) targeting employees of public and private companies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution we developed two analyses: the first to carefully analyze the user experience and any behaviour change related to the Bike2Work mobility campaign, and the second to demonstrate how exploiting the collected data we can potentially inform and guide the involved municipality (i.e., Ferrara, a city in Northern Italy) in improving urban cyclability.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

The Stability of Transient Relationships

In contrast to long-term relationships, far less is known about the temporal evolution of transient relationships, although these constitute a substantial fraction of people's communication networks. Previous literature suggests that ratings of relationship emotional intensity decay gradually until the relationship ends. Using mobile phone data from three countries (US, UK, and Italy), we demonstrate that the volume of communication between ego and its transient alters does not display such a systematic decay, instead showing a lack of any dominant trends. This means that the communication volume of egos to groups of similar transient alters is stable. We show that alters with longer lifetimes in ego's network receive more calls, with the lifetime of the relationship being predictable from call volume within the first few weeks of first contact. This is observed across all three countries, which include samples of egos at different life stages. The relation between early call volume and lifetime is consistent with the suggestion that individuals initially engage with a new alter so as to evaluate their potential as a tie in terms of homophily.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

Living in a pandemic: adaptation of individual mobility and social activity in the US

The non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), aimed at reducing the diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, has dramatically influenced our behaviour in everyday life. In this work, we study how individuals adapted their daily movements and person-to-person contact patterns over time in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the NPIs. We leverage longitudinal GPS mobility data of hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals in four US states and empirically show the dramatic disruption in people's life. We find that local interventions did not just impact the number of visits to different venues but also how people experience them. Individuals spend less time in venues, preferring simpler and more predictable routines and reducing person-to-person contact activities. Moreover, we show that the stringency of interventions alone does explain the number and duration of visits to venues: individual patterns of visits seem to be influenced by the local severity of the pandemic and a risk adaptation factor, which increases the people's mobility regardless of the stringency of interventions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Mobile Money: Understanding and Predicting its Adoption and Use in a Developing Economy

Access to financial institutions is difficult in developing economies and especially for the poor. However, the widespread adoption of mobile phones has enabled the development of mobile money systems that deliver financial services through the mobile phone network. Despite the success of mobile money, there is a lack of quantitative studies that unveil which factors contribute to the adoption and sustained usage of such services. In this paper, we describe the results of a quantitative study that analyzes data from the world's leading mobile money service, M-Pesa. We analyzed millions of anonymized mobile phone communications and M-Pesa transactions in an African country. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we analyze the customers' usage of M-Pesa and report large-scale patterns of behavior; (2) we present the results of applying machine learning models to predict mobile money adoption (AUC=0.691), and mobile money spending (AUC=0.619) using multiple data sources: mobile phone data, M-Pesa agent information, the number of M-Pesa friends in the user's social network, and the characterization of the user's geographic location; (3) we discuss the most predictive features in both models and draw key implications for the design of mobile money services in a developing country. We find that the most predictive features are related to mobile phone activity, to the presence of M-Pesa users in a customer's ego-network and to mobility. We believe that our work will contribute to the understanding of the factors playing a role in the adoption and sustained usage of mobile money services in developing economies.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

Personality Traits and Ego-network Dynamics

Strong and supportive social relationships are fundamental to our well-being. However, there are costs to their maintenance, resulting in a trade-off between quality and quantity, a typical strategy being to put a lot of effort on a few high-intensity relationships while maintaining larger numbers of less close relationships. It has also been shown that there are persistent individual differences in this pattern; some individuals allocate their efforts more uniformly across their networks, while others strongly focus on their closest relationships. Furthermore, some individuals maintain more stable networks than others. Here, we focus on how personality traits of individuals affect this picture, using mobile phone calls records and survey data from the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) study. In particular, we look at the relationship between personality traits and the (i) persistence of social signatures, namely the similarity of the social signature shape of an individual measured in different time intervals; (ii) the turnover in egocentric networks, that is, differences in the set of alters present at two consecutive temporal intervals; and (iii) the rank dynamics defined as the variation of alter rankings in egocentric networks in consecutive intervals. We observe that some traits have effects on the stability of the social signatures as well as network turnover and rank dynamics. As an example, individuals who score highly in the Openness to Experience trait tend to have higher levels of network turnover and larger alter rank variations. On broader terms, our study shows that personality traits clearly affect the ways in which individuals maintain their personal networks.

cs.SI↗