Human Habits Investigation : from Mobility Reconstruction to Mobile Traffic Prediction. (L'étude des habitudes humaines : de la reconstruction de la mobilité à la prédiction du trafic mobile)

The understanding of human behaviors is a central question in multi-disciplinary research and has contributed to a wide range of applications. The ability to foresee human activities has essential implications in many aspects of cellular networks. In particular, the high availability of mobility prediction can enable various application scenarios such as location-based recommendation, home automation, and location-related data dissemination; the better understanding of mobile data traffic demand can help to improve the design of solutions for network load balancing, aiming at improving the quality of Internet-based mobile services. Although a large and growing body of literature has investigated the topic of predicting human mobility, there has been little discussion in anticipating mobile data traffic in cellular networks, especially in spatiotemporal view of individuals.For understanding human mobility, mobile phone datasets, consisting of Charging Data Records (CDRs), are a practical choice of human footprints because of the large-scale user populations and the vast diversity of individual movement patterns. The accuracy of mobility information granted by CDR depends on the network infrastructure and the frequency of user communication events. As cellular network deployment is highly irregular and interaction frequencies are typically low, CDR data is often characterized by spatial and temporal sparsity, which, in turn, can bias mobility analyses based on such data and cause the loss of whereabouts in individual trajectories.In this thesis, we present novel solutions of the reconstruction of individual trajectories and the prediction of individual mobile data traffic. Our contributions address the problems of (1) overcoming the incompleteness of mobility information for the use of mobile phone datasets and (2) predicting future mobile data traffic demand for the support of network management applications.First, we focus on the flaw of mobility information in mobile phone datasets. We report on an in-depth analysis of its effect on the measurement of individual mobility features and the completeness of individual trajectories. In particular, (1) we provide a confirmation of previous findings regarding the biases in mobility measurements caused by the temporal sparsity of CDR; (2) we evaluate the geographical shift caused by the mapping of user locations to cell towers and reveal the bias caused by the spatial sparsity of CDR; (3) we provide an empirical estimation of the data completeness of individual CDR-based trajectories. (4) we propose novel solutions of CDR completion to reconstruct incomplete. Our solutions leverage the nature of repetitive human movement patterns and the state-of-the-art data inference techniques and outperform previous approaches shown by data-driven simulations.Second, we address the prediction of mobile data traffic demands generated by individual mobile network subscribers. Building on trajectories completed by our developed solutions and data consumption histories extracted from a large-scale mobile phone dataset, (1) we investigate the limits of predictability by measuring the maximum predictability that any algorithm has potential to achieve and (2) we propose practical mobile data traffic prediction approaches that utilize the findings of the theoretical predictability analysis. Our theoretical analysis shows that it is theoretically possible to anticipate the individual demand with a typical accuracy of 75% despite the heterogeneity of users and with an improved accuracy of 80% using joint prediction with mobility information. Our practical based on machine learning techniques can achieve a typical accuracy of 65% and have a 1%~5% degree of improvement by considering individual whereabouts.In summary, the contributions mentioned above provide a step further towards supporting the use of mobile phone datasets and the management of network operators and their subscribers.