The Need to Account for Geographical Diversities in Mobile Data Research

Abstract

Large-scale mobile data studies have the potential to provide valuable insights regarding usage behavior of smartphone users. A major challenge in generalising the findings of these studies is the inherent population diversity in large-scale smartphone usage data. Many published studies however do not account for population heterogeneities in their analysis, and instead present their findings based on the aggregate usage data. In this paper, we investigate the effects of geographical diversity on smartphone data collected from 130 users from India, Europe and the US over a period of four months. Our results show significant differences in daily usage duration, session-level usage, and temporal usage patterns across various geographies, and stress the need to account for population heterogeneities in mobile data research and its application in real-world systems.