Money Walks: Implicit Mobility Behavior and Financial Well-Being

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 10; no. 8; p. e0136628
• Main Authors: Singh, Vivek Kumar, Bozkaya, Burcin, Pentland, Alex
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 28.08.2015; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Animal behavior; Animals; Artificial intelligence; Cellular telephones; Consumption (Economics); Credit cards; Credit scoring; Data management; Data mining; Demographics; Demography; Ecology; Economic analysis; Elasticity; Exploration; Financial analysis; Financial institutions; Financial management; Foraging behavior; Forecasts and trends; Human behavior; Humans; Influence; Mobile commerce; Mobility; Models, Economic; Payment systems; Privacy; Shopping; Trends
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0136628

Traditional financial decision systems (e.g. credit) had to rely on explicit individual traits like age, gender, job type, and marital status, while being oblivious to spatio-temporal mobility or the habits of the individual involved. Emerging trends in geo-aware and mobile payment systems, and the resulting "big data," present an opportunity to study human consumption patterns across space and time. Taking inspiration from animal behavior studies that have reported significant interconnections between animal spatio-temporal "foraging" behavior and their life outcomes, we analyzed a corpus of hundreds of thousands of human economic transactions and found that financial outcomes for individuals are intricately linked with their spatio-temporal traits like exploration, engagement, and elasticity. Such features yield models that are 30% to 49% better at predicting future financial difficulties than the comparable demographic models.