A Systematic Review of Mobile Phone Data in Crime Applications: A coherent taxonomy based on data types and analysis perspectives, challenges, and future research directions

Okmi, Mohammed and Por, Lip Yee and Ang, Tan Fong and Al-Hussein, Ward and Ku, Chin Soon (2023) A Systematic Review of Mobile Phone Data in Crime Applications: A coherent taxonomy based on data types and analysis perspectives, challenges, and future research directions. Sensors, 23 (9). ISSN 1424-8220, DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/s23094350.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Digital technologies have recently become more advanced, allowing for the development of social networking sites and applications. Despite these advancements, phone calls and text messages still make up the largest proportion of mobile data usage. It is possible to study human communication behaviors and mobility patterns using the useful information that mobile phone data provide. Specifically, the digital traces left by the large number of mobile devices provide important information that facilitates a deeper understanding of human behavior and mobility configurations for researchers in various fields, such as criminology, urban sensing, transportation planning, and healthcare. Mobile phone data record significant spatiotemporal (i.e., geospatial and time-related data) and communication (i.e., call) information. These can be used to achieve different research objectives and form the basis of various practical applications, including human mobility models based on spatiotemporal interactions, real-time identification of criminal activities, inference of friendship interactions, and density distribution estimation. The present research primarily reviews studies that have employed mobile phone data to investigate, assess, and predict human communication and mobility patterns in the context of crime prevention. These investigations have sought, for example, to detect suspicious activities, identify criminal networks, and predict crime, as well as understand human communication and mobility patterns in urban sensing applications. To achieve this, a systematic literature review was conducted on crime research studies that were published between 2014 and 2022 and listed in eight electronic databases. In this review, we evaluated the most advanced methods and techniques used in recent criminology applications based on mobile phone data and the benefits of using this information to predict crime and detect suspected criminals. The results of this literature review contribute to improving the existing understanding of where and how populations live and socialize and how to classify individuals based on their mobility patterns. The results show extraordinary growth in studies that utilized mobile phone data to study human mobility and movement patterns compared to studies that used the data to infer communication behaviors. This observation can be attributed to privacy concerns related to acquiring call detail records (CDRs). Additionally, most of the studies used census and survey data for data validation. The results show that social network analysis tools and techniques have been widely employed to detect criminal networks and urban communities. In addition, correlation analysis has been used to investigate spatial-temporal patterns of crime, and ambient population measures have a significant impact on crime rates.

Item Type: Article
Funders: UNSPECIFIED
Uncontrolled Keywords: Mobile phone data; Call detail records (CDRs); Urban human mobility patterns; Human communication behavior; Urban dynamics; criminal networks; social networks; urban crime prediction; urban sensing; systematic literature review
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Divisions: Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology
Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology > Department of Computer System & Technology
Depositing User: Ms Zaharah Ramly
Date Deposited: 19 Feb 2024 08:51
Last Modified: 19 Feb 2024 08:51
URI: http://eprints.um.edu.my/id/eprint/38264

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item