Understanding population displacements on location-based call records using road data

Abstract

Large population displacements are usually observed after nature disasters. The best approximations to real world population movement in such a short temporal scale are the users' movements patterns derived from the cell phone usage data. However, due to a lot of political, economic and privacy constraints, these sensitive data are not always available. On the other hand, population movements are usually observed on the underlying road network. The correlation between the cell phone users' movement and the road network has yet been examined. The aim of this research is to compare the topological structure and the network metrics of the road network to the cell phone users' movement network in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire, and to inspect the correlations of movement volume and road connectivity. A flooding scenario was assumed to inspect the responds from both the movement network and road network. Our analysis shows that the cellphone users' movement network and the road network present significant similarities in terms of network partition. Our research also indicates that the road topology could be utilized as a proxy to approximate the population movement volume on above. We present an initial step to help the data-scarce area understand the population movement pattern from more readily-available road network data. Furthermore, our results suggest that traditional evacuation planning should consider the social perspective of population connections and periodical movements.