If you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change. Without a commute or workspace, most people will make a higher portion of their calls from home and they might make fewer calls, too.
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A study co-authored by MIT researchers shows that mobile phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, precisely because people's communications patterns change when they are not working.
Indeed, using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for their study, the researchers found that in the months following layoffs, the total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51 percent compared with working residents, and by 41 percent compared with all phone users.
The number of calls made by a newly unemployed worker to someone in the town where they had worked fell by 5 percentage points, and even the number of individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers dropped by around 20 percent.
The paper, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, builds a model of cellphone usage that lets the researchers correlate cellphone usage patterns with aggregate changes in employment.
The researchers believe the phone data closely aligns with standard unemployment measures, and may allow analysts to make unemployment projections two to eight weeks faster than those made using traditional methods.
The study's starting point was an automotive plant in Europe that closed in 2006, leaving about 1,100 workers unemployed in a town of roughly 15,000 people.
Having the information about the layoffs allowed the researchers to build an algorithm that, by analyzing phone-use patterns, assigns a probability that someone has become unemployed. The phone data was anonymous at the individual level, ensuring a certain level of privacy.
The researchers then extended that usage model to see how well it corresponded with larger-scale unemployment, using eight quarters of unemployment data in 52 provinces of a European country. ■
The mid to upper level flow continues to amplify across the CONUS, leading to an active weather pattern across large portions of the eastern third of the nation.