Francisco presented Correcting Distorted Human Mobility Data from Mobile Phone Applications at the Transport Lab Seminar Series, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, on 20 June 2025.
Access to human mobility data is key for a wide variety of social challenges, including urban planning, sustainability, public health, and economic development. Location trace data collected through digital technologies, such as mobile applications, have become widely available to study human mobility and overcome key limitations of traditional data streams such as surveys and censuses. Yet digital trace data are not representative of the general population and consequently require statistical adjustment to mitigate existing biases and support robust statistical inference.
The talk presented work from the ESRC-funded DEBIAS project, which aims to develop a generalisable framework to measure, assess, and correct existing biases in human mobility data extracted from digital trace data. First, it introduced a measure to quantify biases in spatial population counts derived from mobile phone applications and identify the key demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic features underlying these biases. Second, it outlined a proposed framework to mitigate biases in spatial population count data and generate bias-adjusted human mobility counts from mobile phone applications. Third, it presented plans for future work in this area.
