Analyzing and Modeling Temporal Patterns of Human Contacts in Cellular Networks

As the usage of wireless devices rapidly increases, mobile phones have become an important aid for people to maintain social relationships. Analysis on cellular networks through mobile communication records, especially when such records contain temporal and spatial information, can potentially unveil fundamental laws that govern the dynamics of social networks. In this paper, we use call detail records (CDRs) collected from a nation-wide cellular network in North America for more than one month. We analyze contact patterns over one million pairs of people using real call data as looking into pairwise call records for each pair. First, we investigate the impacts of social relationships on contacts and discover that family members show different characteristics from non-family pairs in terms of contact regularity or duration. Next, we characterize inter-contact time and contact duration using finite mixture models of Gaussian, Lognormal, and Gamma distributions for each pair. Our mixture models for pairwise communication patterns of cellular users capture and demonstrate burstiness, periodicity, and inhomogeneity of human communication.