Trip extraction for traffic analysis using cellular network data

To get a better understanding of people's mobility, cellular network signalling data including location information, is a promising large-scale data source. In order to estimate travel demand and infrastructure usage from the data, it is necessary to identify the trips users make. We present two trip extraction methods and compare their performance using a small dataset collected in Sweden. The trips extracted are compared with GPS tracks collected on the same mobiles. Despite the much lower location sampling rate in the cellular network signalling data, we are able to detect most of the trips found from GPS data. This is promising, given the relative simplicity of the algorithms. However, further investigation is necessary using a larger dataset and more types of algorithms. By applying the same methods to a second dataset for Senegal with much lower sampling rate than the Sweden dataset, we show that the choice of the trip extraction method tends to be even more important when the sampling rate is low.