Assessing veracity of big data: An in-depth evaluation process from the comparison of Mobile phone traces and groundtruth data in traffic monitoring

Alessandro Nalin, Valeria Vignali, Claudio Lantieri, Denis Cappellari, Bruno Zamengo and Andrea Simone

Journal of Transport Geography, 2024, vol. 118, issue C

Abstract: Veracity is a critical dimension of Big Data, as it is related to the quality of data. Its role is even more important when Big Data are supposed to be a counterpart or a substitute of official data. While the former is usually unstructured and the collecting procedures are unsupervised, the latter is collected in accordance to strict and rigorous methodologies. Mobile phone traces, alternatively called Cellphone Big Data (CBD), can be ascribed among the most popular Big Data typology in transportation analyses, even if they are affected by some biases. This research effort is aimed to contribute to the discussion on Big Data and to shed light on the need of a rigorous assessment of the dataset quality. An in-depth evaluation process was carried out with the comparison of CBD to groundtruth data, namely traffic-related data collected by Anas S.p.A. – Gruppo Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane along a major Italian trunk road. What emerges from this paper is the sensitiveness of CBD to some variables related to both cinematic characteristics of traffic, mobile phone network characteristics and the traffic condition, namely the vehicle occupancy rate.

Keywords: Big data; Mobile phone data; Traffic analysis; Transport-related policies; Veracity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096669232400139X

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:118:y:2024:i:c:s096669232400139x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.103930

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().