An intriguing open question is whether measurements derived from Big Data recording human activities can yield high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users’ trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly “nowcast” the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory.
The interest around the analysis of Big Data and the possibility to compile them into a comprehensive picture of human behavior have infected all branches of human knowledge, from sports @cite_25 to economy @cite_6 . However, two aspects in particular attracted the interest of scientists in the last decade, due the striking abundance of data in those contexts: human mobility and social networks.
@cite_25 @cite_6
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Sports analytics in general, and football (soccer in USA) analytics in particular, have evolved in recent years in an amazing way, thanks to automated or semi-automated sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams extracted from every game. In this paper we propose a data-driven approach and show that there is a large potential to boost the understanding of football team performance. From observational data of football games we extract a set of pass-based performance indicators and summarize them in the H indicator. We observe a strong correlation among the proposed indicator and the success of a team, and therefore perform a simulation on the four major European championships (78 teams, almost 1500 games). The outcome of each game in the championship was replaced by a synthetic outcome (win, loss or draw) based on the performance indicators computed for each team. We found that the final rankings in the simulated championships are very close to the actual rankings in the real championships, and show that teams with high ranking error show extreme values of a defense attack efficiency measure, the Pezzali score. Our results are surprising given the simplicity of the proposed indicators, suggesting that a complex systems' view on football data has the potential of revealing hidden patterns and behavior of superior quality. Aim of this paper is to introduce the complex system perspective into retail market analysis. Currently, to understand the retail market means to search for local patterns at the micro level, involving the segmentation, separation and profiling of diverse groups of consumers. In other contexts, however, markets are modelled as complex systems. Such strategy is able to uncover emerging regularities and patterns that make markets more predictable, e.g. enabling to predict how much a country’s GDP will grow. Rather than isolate actors in homogeneous groups, this strategy requires to consider the system as a whole, as the emerging pattern can be detected only as a result of the interaction between its self-organizing parts. This assumption holds also in the retail market: each customer can be seen as an independent unit maximizing its own utility function. As a consequence, the global behaviour of the retail market naturally emerges, enabling a novel description of its properties, complementary to the local pattern approach. Such task demands for a data-driven empirical framework. In this paper, we analyse a unique transaction database, recording the micro-purchases of a million customers observed for several years in the stores of a national supermarket chain. We show the emergence of the fundamental pattern of this complex system, connecting the products’ volumes of sales with the customers’ volumes of purchases. This pattern has a number of applications. We provide three of them. By enabling us to evaluate the sophistication of needs that a customer has and a product satisfies, this pattern has been applied to the task of uncovering the hierarchy of needs of the customers, providing a hint about what is the next product a customer could be interested in buying and predicting in which shop she is likely to go to buy it.