From mobile-network data to mobility indicators
The mobility insights big-data platform processes anonymised network events — more than 2 Million per second — and produces more than 10 Million anonymous trips per day. These trips are trajectories that we describe in term of time, space and mode of transport. As we focus on collective mobility, we aggregate these trips into dynamic mobility indicators that describe minute by minute the mobility pulse of Switzerland. For example, we are able to quantify, for a given minute of the day, the number of highway and train trips that go through a given area. We are also able to build the associated distribution of origins and destinations. All results we share are k-anonymised to minimise the risk of re-identification.
Collecting ground-truth data
Benchmarking machine-learning algorithms requires data that associate samples with ground truth (actual label). This is challenging given that the machine learning task at hand is very specific with no public datasets available. We therefore decided to collect the data ourselves: we developed an application — only open to Swisscom employees with an explicit opt-in — that provides personalised mobility reports which describe the daily trips performed by the user as well as the associated CO2 footprint. At the same time, the user is able to provide feedback: She can rate the reconstructed trip, correct the origin and destination of each trip as well as the detected mode of transport.