Title: Urban Dreams of Migrants: A Case Study of Migrant Integration in Shanghai,
Abstract: Unprecedented human mobility has driven the rapid urbanization around the
world. In China, the fraction of population dwelling in cities increased from
17.9% to 52.6% between 1978 and 2012. Such large-scale migration poses
challenges for policymakers and important questions for researchers. To
investigate the process of migrant integration, we employ a one-month complete
dataset of telecommunication metadata in Shanghai with 54 million users and 698
million call logs. We find systematic differences between locals and migrants
in their mobile communication networks and geographical locations. For
instance, migrants have more diverse contacts and move around the city with a
larger radius than locals after they settle down. By distinguishing new
migrants (who recently moved to Shanghai) from settled migrants (who have been
in Shanghai for a while), we demonstrate the integration process of new
migrants in their first three weeks. Moreover, we formulate classification
problems to predict whether a person is a migrant. Our classifier is able to
achieve an F1-score of 0.82 when distinguishing settled migrants from locals,
but it remains challenging to identify new migrants because of class imbalance.
This classification setup holds promise for identifying new migrants who will
successfully integrate into locals (new migrants that misclassified as locals).