Understanding call logs of smartphone users for making future calls

Abstract

In this measurement study, we analyze whether mobile phone users exhibit temporal regularity in their mobile communication. To this end, we collected a mobile phone usage dataset from a developing country - Pakistan. The data consists of 783 users and 229, 450 communication events. We found a number of interesting patterns both at the aggregate level and at dyadic level in the data. Some interesting results include: the number of calls to different alters consistently follow the rank-size rule; a communication event between an ego-alter(user-contact) pair greatly increases the chances of another communication event; certain ego-alter pairs tend to communicate more over weekends; ego-alter pairs exhibit autocorrelation in various time quantum. Identifying such idiosyncrasies in the ego-alter communication can help improve the calling experience of smartphone users by automatically (smartly) sorting the call log without any manual intervention.