Cell Phone Data Predicts Movement Patterns

azoblue writes "In a study published in Science, researchers examined customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time."

Comments

Uh huh...

[spiffmastercow]

So you're saying that analyzing movement patterns allows you to predict movement patterns. Would you like to guess the color of my red car?

Re:This was done last year

[Bootle]

That's nice.

The study picked 50k people who each average 2 or more calls per hour for a six month period and make at least one call for every hour of the week. That's a lot of calls.

If anything, the main criticism should be that people who make that many calls are not a representative population...

upper bound

[dario_moreno]

This seems to be the upper bound of predictability by computers ; in other domains of artificial intelligence, such as automatic translation or speech recognition, automated statistical analysis from corpuses seems to perform better than manual encoding of rules, but ends up at maybe 90% efficiency. The rest is too random to be predicted, and it could be the part of poetry, art or intelligence in our lives.

Re:Traffic lights

[FlyingBishop]

They aren't programmed to get you where you're going quickly. They're programmed to slow you down so you don't run into someone (and no one runs into you.)