User Modeling for Telecommunication Applications: Experiences and Practical Implications

Telecommunication applications based on user modeling focus on extracting customer behavior and preferences from the information implicitly included in Call Detail Record (CDR) datasets. Even though there are many different application areas (fraud detection, viral and targeted marketing, churn prediction, etc.) they all share a common data source (CDRs) and a common set of features for modeling the user. In this paper we present our experience with different applications areas in generating user models from massive real datasets of both mobile phone and landline subscriber activity. We present the analysis of a dataset containing the traces of 50,000 mobile phone users and 50,000 landline users from the same geographical area for a period of six months and compare the different behaviors when using landlines and mobile phones and the implications that such differences have for each application. Our results indicate that user models for a variety of applications can be generated efficiently and in a homogeneous way using an architecture based on distributed computing and that there are numerous differences between mobile phone and landline users that have relevant practical implications.