Evaluating Digital Divide Based on Big Wireless Logs: A Case Study among Remote Tribes in Taiwan

Abstract This research attempts to explore digital divide among tribes in Taiwan and to reveal relevant important tribal contextual features. Firstly, we collect residents’ connection event logs from the free wireless Internet, i-Tribe. Those connect behaviors are quantified as average of daily connection frequency, daily connection time, daily data transmission, inter-login time, Internet speed, and connection quality which are corresponding to evaluate how often, how long, how much, how active, how fast and the effectiveness of the information and communication technology (ICT) accessibility of tribes. Then the tribes are grouped into tribal clusters optimally by a rank aggregation algorithm and are asked if there are significant differences among them by three stages of hypothesis testing. After the phenomenon of digital divide is confirmed, some important contextual features, longitude, female dependency ratio, network environment level, economic service level, and policy cooperation level, are identified using the ordinal regression model (ORM).