The experience of using the mobile phone data in economic geographical researches in foreign

Abstract

The era of Big Data and the emergence of new sources of geo-information, including mobile phone data, have provided fundamentally new opportunities for research on many socio-economic processes. Compared to traditional statistical sources, mobile phone data has many unique features and advantages that attract scientists from various fields of knowledge. Extensive experience in the use of technologies for collecting and processing spatial information from mobile phones over the past 15 years has led to an interest in them in order to improve demographic statistics, transport planning, analysis of settlement systems, tourism statistics, study of human behavior and emergency monitoring. The article demonstrates various cases of using mobile operator data in scientific and applied research in these areas based on the examples of foreign works. The foreign practice of using data from mobile operators demonstrates how data analysis can complement the results of censuses and population registers, making it possible to move from a static to dynamic consideration of the settlement system. The combination of mobile telephony data with traditional statistics, as well as other types of Big Data, such as remote sensing, helps to improve the spatial and temporal resolution of geo-information in the study of demographic and socio-economic processes. At the same time, it can be observed that the potential use of this data source is not limited to supplementing the system of existing statistical indicators, but includes the creation of new socio-economic indicators. At the same time, the long-standing problem of national statistics lagging behind the leading countries of Europe and the United States can be largely offset by the incorporation of Big Data into research practices.