Abstract. The Orange "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge is an open data challenge on anonymous call patterns of Orange's mobile phone users in Ivory Coast. The goal of the challenge is to help address society development questions in novel ways by contributing to the socio-economic development and well-being of the Ivory Coast population. Participants to the challenge are given access to four mobile phone datasets and the purpose of this paper is to describe the four datasets. The website http://www.d4d.orange.com contains more information about the participation rules. The datasets are based on anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) of phone calls and SMS exchanges between five million of Orange's customers in Ivory Coast between December 1, 2011 and April 28, 2012. The datasets are: (a) antenna-to-antenna traffic on an hourly basis, (b) individual trajectories for 50,000 customers for two week time windows with antenna location information, (3) individual trajectories for 500,000 customers over the entire observation period with sub-prefecture location information, and (4) 1. Introduction. The availability of detailed mobility traces and mobile phone communication data for large populations has already had a significant impact on research in behavioral science. Some researchers consider such datasets as an opportunity to refine the analysis of human behavior [5] , while others question the usefulness of such datasets to draw conclusions on collective human behavior [1, 2, 5] . Digital traces left by mobile phone users often reveal sensitive private individual information. It is therefore natural to limit access to such data. Limited access to data of scientific interest is however a potential source of a "new digital divide" in the scientific community, as described in [2] . In order to improve the availability of large mobile phone datasets and to foster research in this area, the Orange Group decided to provide anonymized datasets from Ivory Coast for the purpose of scientific research. With around five million customers, Orange has a significant market share in Ivory Coast, whose total population is estimated to be 20 million individuals. In addition to the scientific benefit, the project intends to foster development in Ivory Coast by establishing new collaborations with African scientists and by providing behavioral data that has not yet been collected by the national statistics agency [3] .
An exception is represented by the Data For Development dataset by Orange REF , including mobility information for 50,000 users in Ivory Coast, as well as CDR (call-detail record) information for phone calls and SMS messages.
Data for Development: the D4D Challenge on Mobile Phone Data
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