Robocallers stand out in a troll through Chinese cell phone records

SRU.edu

The availability of electronic records of communications, from the use of cellphones to chats in online games, has given social scientists new options for studying how humans interact. Communication patterns, friendship networks, and the spread of ideas have all become accessible to large-scale analysis. Now, researchers have combed the records of 5.9 million Chinese cellphone users, trying to figure out the normal pattern of calls they make. And in the process, they've identified a few abnormal patterns, ones that probably aren't made by humans at all.

The researchers, four of whom hailed from Shanghai's East China University of Science and Technology, involved in the work obtained 108 days worth of call data from an unspecified Chinese carrier. They used these to identify the 100,000 most active callers, since these should call often enough to provide a decent picture of the statistics. Although their records could be analyzed a number of different ways, they chose to focus on the interval between calls: how often, in general, does one wait before making a second phone call?

You might expect that this value would show a classic poisson distribution, with a bell-shaped curve centered on some reasonable value. But, in fact, the typical time between calls overall showed a power law distribution, the classic spread that shows a peak towards one end of the graph, followed by a "long tail" of gradual decreasing.