On Predicting Sociodemographics from Mobility Signals

Household-travel surveys (HTSs) have long provided the empirical backbone for this work by coupling rich trip diaries with respondent characteristics such as age, gender, income, and household composition. Analyses drawing on these surveys consistently show that, after accounting for the built environment, so-ciodemographic traits still correlate with car ownership, mode choice, trip frequency, and trip-chaining behavior (Bhat and Koppelman, 1994; Lee et al., 2007; Lu and Pas, 1999; McGuckin and Murakami, 1999; Mokhtarian and Chen, 2004) In the past dozen years, the ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones has spawned a parallel, industry-scale source of mobility evidence in passively-generated mobile data, which includes call-detail records (CDR), location-based service (LBS) pings, connected-vehicle traces, and the like (Chen et al., 2016). These datasets dwarf HTSs in both sample size and temporal length, are refreshed continuously, and can often be licensed at a fraction of the cost of running a tailored survey. Their content, however, is almost exclusively spatial temporal; they record where and when a device was observed but remain agnostic about who was holding it. This missing dimension limits many distributional and behavioral analyses, including those that require understanding how travel patterns vary across population subgroups. Despite this blind spot, public agencies have been keen on experimenting with mobile data products (Ugurel et al., 2024). Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) see potential in using them to stitch origin-destination matrices (Alexander et al., 2015; Iqbal et al., 2014), site electric-vehicle chargers (Yang et al., 2017), and evaluate complete-street retrofits (Bian et al., 2023). Yet the lack of respondent attributes imposes two related hazards.