text: In this work, we analyze the problem of adoption of mobile money in Pakistan by using the call detail records of a major telecom company as our input. Our results highlight the fact that different sections of the society have different patterns of adoption of digital financial services but user mobility related features are the most important one when it comes to adopting and using mobile money services.
  @cite_9: Billions of people around the world live without access to banks or other formal financial institutions. In the past several years, many mobile operators have launched "Mobile Money" platforms that deliver basic financial services over the mobile phone network. While many believe that these services can improve the lives of the poor, in many countries adoption of Mobile Money still remains anemic. In this paper, we develop a predictive model of Mobile Money adoption that uses billions of mobile phone communications records to understand the behavioral determinants of adoption. We describe a novel approach to feature engineering that uses a Deterministic Finite Automaton to construct thousands of behavioral metrics of phone use from a concise set of recursive rules. These features provide the foundation for a predictive model that is tested on mobile phone operators logs from Ghana, Pakistan, and Zambia, three very different developing-country contexts. The results highlight the key correlates of Mobile Money use in each country, as well as the potential for such methods to predict and drive adoption. More generally, our analysis provides insight into the extent to which homogenized supervised learning methods can generalize across geographic contexts. We find that without careful tuning, a model that performs very well in one country frequently does not generalize to another.
  @cite_1: Accurate and timely estimates of population characteristics are a critical input to social and economic research and policy. In industrialized economies, novel sources of data are enabling new approaches to demographic profiling, but in developing countries, fewer sources of big data exist. We show that an individual’s past history of mobile phone use can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic status. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the predicted attributes of millions of individuals can, in turn, accurately reconstruct the distribution of wealth of an entire nation or to infer the asset distribution of microregions composed of just a few households. In resource-constrained environments where censuses and household surveys are rare, this approach creates an option for gathering localized and timely information at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
  @cite_6: We combine data from a field survey with transaction log data from a mobile phone operator to provide new insight into daily patterns of mobile phone use in Rwanda. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, we present a statistical comparison of the general Rwandan population to the population of mobile phone owners in Rwanda. We find that phone owners are considerably wealthier, better educated, and more predominantly male than the general population. Second, we analyze patterns of phone use and access, based on self-reported survey data. We note statistically significant differences by gender; for instance, women are more likely to use shared phones than men. Third, we perform a quantitative analysis of calling patterns and social network structure using mobile operator billing logs. By these measures, the differences between men and women are more modest, but we observe vast differences in utilization between the relatively rich and the relatively poor. Taken together, the evidence in this paper suggests that phones are disproportionately owned and used by the privileged strata of Rwandan society.
  @cite_3: 
summary: We have used deterministic finite automata (DFA) based feature engineering over CDR data which is quite similar to the approach used in @cite_9 and @cite_1 . Lastly, the differences in the usage of technology across men and women, poor & rich, and the urban & rural population has been a popular theme of research in the ICTD domain @cite_3 , @cite_6 ,etc. In comparison to these studies, our work employs a more comprehensive feature engineering approach over a bigger dataset to evaluate the role of the different type of features in the adoption of mobile money for people with different demographic backgrounds.