We present a methodology to estimate the number of attendees to events happening in the city 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 to 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.
The work presented in @cite_16 @cite_9 presents another approach to analyze people attendance to special events on the basis of CDRs coming from the AirSage ( www.airsage .com ) platform. In this work, they segment users' traces to identify those places where a user stops. If this place, coincides with the place of the event and if the duration of the stop is at least the 70 the event, the user is classified as attending the event. On this basis they are able to analyze the attendance to specific events. However, they claim: Estimating the actual number of attendees is still an open problem, considering also that ground truth data to validate models is sometime absent or very noisy '' and do not perform quantitative analysis in this direction.
@cite_9 @cite_16
1537940195 2156785885
This paper deals with the analysis of crowd mobility during special events. We analyze nearly 1 million cell-phone traces and associate their destinations with social events. We show that the origins of people attending an event are strongly correlated to the type of event, with implications in city management, since the knowledge of additive flows can be a critical information on which to take decisions about events management and congestion mitigation. A system for measuring audiences of outdoor advertising in specific areas is based on the combination of mobile phone location estimations with Internet listings of social events.