Estimating attendance from cellular network data

An automatic estimate of the number of attendees to events happening in the city can provide valuable information to geographic information systems and geo-located applications. We present a methodology to estimate the number of events’ attendees from cellular network data. In this work, we used anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) comprising data on where and when users access the cellular network. Our approach is based on two key ideas: (1) we identify the network cells associated with the event location. (2) We verify the attendance of each user, as a measure of whether (s)he generates CDRs during the event, but not during other times. We evaluate our approach to estimate the number of attendees to a number of events ranging from football matches in stadiums to concerts and festivals in open squares. Comparing our results with the best groundtruth data available, our estimates provide a median error of less than 15% of the actual number of attendees.