Volume 28, Issue 5 pp. 1412-1438
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Coupling human mobility and social relationships to predict individual socioeconomic status: A graph neural network approach

Xiao Chen

Xiao Chen

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Tao Pei

Corresponding Author

Tao Pei

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing, China

Correspondence

Tao Pei, State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 11A, Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China.

Email: [email protected]

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Ci Song

Ci Song

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Hua Shu

Hua Shu

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Sihui Guo

Sihui Guo

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Xi Wang

Xi Wang

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Yaxi Liu

Yaxi Liu

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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Jie Chen

Jie Chen

State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

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First published: 07 June 2024

Abstract

Understanding individual's socioeconomic status (SES) can provide supporting information for designing political and economic policies. Acquiring large-scale economic survey data is time-consuming and laborious. The widespread mobile phone data, which can reflect human mobility and social network characteristics, has become a low-cost data source for researchers to infer SES. However, previous studies often oversimplify human mobility features and social network features extracted from mobile phone data into general statistical features, resulting in discounting some important temporal and relational information. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive framework for individual SES prediction that effectively utilizes a combination of human mobility and social relationships. In this framework, Word2Vec module extracts human mobility features from mobile phone positioning data, and graph neural network (GNN) module GraphSAGE captures social network characteristics constructed from call detail records. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed approach by training the model with real-world data in Beijing. According to the experimental results, our proposed hybrid approach outperformed the other methods evidently, demonstrating that human mobility and social links are complementary in the characterization of SES. Coupling human mobility and social links can further deepen our understanding of cities' economic geography.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors declare no competing interests.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Research data are not shared.

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