Estimating individual employment status using mobile phone network data

Understand

This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data.

• Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks are intimately connected to employment status and professions of household breadwinners.
• At a societal level unemployment is an important indicator of the performance of an economy.
• By deriving a broad set of novel mobile phone network indicators reflecting users financial, social and mobility patterns we show how machine learning models can be used to predict 18 categories of profession in a South-Asian developing country.