Version: 1.0.1 | Published: 22 May 2025 | Updated: 0 days ago
Spectus Origin-Destination Derived Mobility Data
Dataset
Summary
Tier:
Tier 1
Documentation
Description:
Data derived from mobile phone GPS data provided by Spectus (a mobility and location data provider) who collect GDPR compliant, de-identified data from opted-in users of smartphone apps who have provided informed consent for their anonymized data to be used for research purposes. The data has been aggregated to daily indexed counts of journeys between local authorities (2021 boundaries) in the UK between 2019 and the end of 2021. The data is presented as rounded z-values between each origin-destination pair (including intra-local-authority flows) and the journey count decile.
How Published:
Data asset provided by the Healthy & Sustainable Places Data Service
(ES/Z504336/1), originally produced by the CDRC (ES/L011840/1;ES/L011891/1)
Coverage
Spatial
Spatial Units:
local authority district
Spatial Coverage:
UK: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland
Temporal
Start Date:
01 January 2019
End Date:
31 December 2021
Frequency:
STATIC
Date of First Release:
18 March 2023
Temporal Aggregation:
Daily
Geographic Bounding Box
Lower Left Latitude:
-8.2
Lower Left Longitude:
49.9
Upper Right Latitude:
1.9
Upper Right Longitude:
61.0
Provenance
Purpose:
Data were originally collected for operational purposes by the data partner.
Collection Status:
Complete
Method of Collection:
The data has been derived from mobile phone GPS data provided by Spectus who
collect GDPR compliant de-identified data from opted-in users of smartphone apps
who have provided informed consent for their anonymized data to be used for
research purposes. The data is collected via a Software Development Kit (SDK)
made available to mobile app developers. The source data has been aggregated and
indexed to capture daily counts of journeys between local authorities. To avoid
statistical disclosure of any individual journeys, data is only included in this
derived data product if at least 10 journeys occur between the origin and
destination local authority on a given day. A clustering algorithm is applied by
Spectus to determines stops in activity of individuals in space and time. A
journey in this dataset consists of two different stops recorded by Spectus
within a 24-hour period. The two stops may be within the same local authority,
but not identical coordinates. The timestamp is of the day of the origin
location; the destination location may have been reached the next day, but
within 24 hours of the origin. If an individual’s location is recorded more than
twice in 24 hours, journeys are only defined from consecutive pairs of stops.
Journey counts upon which the data is based are of the number of individuals who
journeyed between local authorities, not the number of journeys, so individuals
that made multiple identical journeys in the same 24-hour period are not counted
multiple times. The absolute number of individuals journeying between two local
authorities has been normalised to minimise any residual risk of disclosure.
This normalisation procedure has been conducted in two ways, leading to two
distinct normalised values in the dataset. For temporal analysis of each
OD-pair, the variable ‘pair_zvalue_rounded’ is the daily deviance from the
average value (the number of standard deviations from the mean) for that pair.
For the analysis of the data between OD-pairs, the variable
‘journey_count_decile’ provides the decile of the overall count of journeys
across the entire dataset.
Notes on Representation:
The data suffers from representation and bias issues that commonly afflict
location data collected via mobile phones, stemming from the fact that the
participants are self-selected and require mobile phones as well as sufficient
usage of certain apps in order to generate timestamps. Other studies have
investigated the representativeness of the source data (
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02092-7) and found it to be reflective of the
population counts at the level of Local Authorities; however there may still be
segments of the population that are under-represented here. No demographic data
on the participants in the data is available.
Access and Governance
Usage
Resource Creator:
- Peter Baudains (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6146-7147)
- Francesca Pontin (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7143-8718)
Is Referenced By:
Data Use Requirements:
NO REQUIREMENTS
Access
Jurisdiction:
Great Britain
Data Controller:
Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service
Availability Status:
Active
Licence:
Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Format and Standards
Language:
English
File Format:
.csv
Estimated Dataset Size:
25MB-10GB
Enrichment and Linkage
Linkage Opportunity:
Join to LAD21CD level data.
Origin
Name:
Data Catalogue