Al‑Molhem et al.

J Big Data (2019) 6:99

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0264-6

RESEARCH Open Access

Social network analysis in Telecom data

Nour Raeef Al‑Molhem* , Yasser Rahal and Mustapha Dakkak

*Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract
Faculty of Information Many systems can be represented as networks or graph collections of nodes joined by
Technology, Higher Institute
for Applied Sciences edges. The social structures in these networks can be investigated using graph theory
and Technology, Damascus, through a process called social network analysis (SNA). In this paper, networks and SNA
Syria concepts were applied using Telecom data such as call detail records (CDRs) and cus‑
tomers data to model our social network and to construct a weighed graph in which
each relation carries a different weight, representing how close two subscribers are
to each other. In addition, SNA is used to explore the Telecom network and calculate
the centrality measures, which help determine the node importance in the network.
Depending on centrality measures as well as influence capability of node measure, the
influencers in network were detected and targeted by marketing campaigns resulting
in 30% raise in growth rate of mobile traffic compared with traditional ways. Finding
Multi-SIM subscribers within the same operator or across different operators presents
another important concern to Telecom companies because it allows to improve
campaigns and churn prediction models. Social network similarity measures and social
behavioral measures between nodes were calculated in the Telecom network to detect
these Multi-SIM subscribes and 85% accuracy result was achieved for subscribes from
different operators and 92% for subscribes from the same operator. The paper is based
on a real dataset of 3 months CDRs and customer data provided by a local Telecom
operator. This dataset is used to build a network with more than 16 million nodes and
more than 300 million edges on a big data platform.
Keywords: Influencers, Similarity, Telecom social network analysis, Multi-SIM, CDR, Big
data

Introduction
The process of defining social communication based on both the network and the
graph theory is known as social network analysis (SNA) [1]. SNA is used to analyze
relationships among interacting nodes (customers, products ...etc.) which is impor-
tant to discover the structure and reliance of individuals or organizations. This
approach has now become a powerful tool to study networks in various areas like
banking, Telecom, web applications, physics and social science. Relationships in a
network can either be directional or non-directional. In a directional relationship one
person is the initiator (or source of the relationship) while the other is the receiver (or
destination of the relationship), a weight indicating the strength of the relationship
can be added. In Telecom domain, SNA uses the CDRs of the operator [2, 3], which
is a data record produced by a telephone exchange. This data record documents the
details of any Telecom transaction (calls, SMS , internet ...) that passes through the

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 2 of 17

Fig. 1 Sample of decomposition by k-shell method

mobile devices. In addition to CDRs, SNA uses other data sources like customers data
to analyze the social relations of subscribes. Linking this information together with
SNA gives better insights and values that affect the revenue and the customer satis-
faction [4]. CDRs and customers data gathered for 3 months were used in our work to
implement the data ETL (Extracting, Transforming and Loading) and the data sum-
mary to build a social network where nodes represent GSM numbers of subscribers
and edges represent interactions between subscribers (calls in our case).
An influencer in network is defined as a node which is well connected. It is capable
of propagating information to lots of people [5]. In Telecom domain influence sub-
scribers are usually considered to be well-connected to other subscribers in network.
This good connection guarantees low risk for churn but high potential for diffusion
of products and services [6]. Finding the actual influencers in Telecom field is a chal-
lenging topic and it depends largely on intuition, personal experiences and how the
influencer is interpreted. In our work eigenvector centrality [7] is used to measure
the importance of subscribers [8]. This centrality indicates that one node’s impor-
tance is determined by its neighbors’ importance as well as number of nodes linked to
this node. In addition to eigenvector centrality, k-shell decomposition method which
is a fast node ranking method for large-scale networks [9] is also used in detecting
influencers, to identify the most influential nodes located in the core of the graph. It
partitions a graph into sub-structures that are directly linked to centrality; Fig. 1 rep-
resents a sample of decomposition by k-shell method.
This method assigns an index ks to each node. This index represents the location
of the node in the graph and depends on the node degree [10] which is the num-
ber of edges the node has. First, all nodes with degree k = 1 are removed recursively
from the network and a ks = 1 value assigned to them. This procedure is repeated
iteratively until only nodes with degree k > 1 are left in the network. All previous
steps are repeated with changing of values of k and ks until all nodes in the network

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 3 of 17

Table 1 The iteration process of k-shell decomposition

Node degree Deleted nodes Iteration order ks

1 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 18 , 19 , 20 1 1
1 4 , 9 , 14 , 17 2 1
1 6 , 16 3 1
2 7 , 8 , 15 1 2
3 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 1 3

are assigned to one of the k-shell values. Table 1 shows the iteration process and the
assigned ks values of each node of the network in Fig. 1.
We used k-shell values to calculate the influence score for each node in the network.
The most influential nodes are the highest in score.
A subscriber in a Telecom operator might possess more than one line within the same
operator or across different operators. Multi-SIM subscribers with different operators
have a higher potentiality to churn than ordinary subscribers. They cost the operator
to lose the chance of initiating and receiving all their traffic. Detecting the Multi-SIM
subscribers across different operators allows for even more usage profiling that will help
create more tuned campaigns and enrich churn prediction models. Using the social
dimension manifested in the relationships among customers provided by SNA, we built
a strong Multi-SIM detection model that guarantees more stability against seasonal
changes and traffic usage fluctuations, and ensures linking the other dials belonging to
the single customer within the same operator and across different operators.
The Telecom operators have massive data resources such as CDRs, customers profile
data, customers location data and so on. How to effectively store, parse and analyze this
amount of data represent the main challenge that faces Telecom operators especially
when new techniques such as SNA and machine learning algorithms, which require
huge amount of memory and distributed processing solutions, are applied. Here comes
the need of a big data platform that can effectively processes data of varying sizes and
complexities, facilities the calculations and reduces the processing time [11]. A big data
platform which contains various tools and capabilities was chosen to handle the previ-
ous challenges in Telecom data.
One of our primary motivations in this paper is to present a new way to build a large-
scale social network from Telecom data using the big data platform. This platform is
designed as a solution to the challenges that we usually face in extracting the SNA meas-
ures in large-scale networks. Another motivation of our research is to provide models
based on real data that can help decision makers in Telecom companies to plan for the
right offers and targeting the most influence customers in the network, which increase
cross-selling and up-selling products and reduce the marketing costs.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: In “Related work” section, we present
related works on using SNA in Telecom domain; “Methods” section describes the data
set we used in this research as well as how we built Telecom network and feature extrac-
tion methods to determine Influencers and Multi-SIM subscribers. In “Results and dis-
cussion” section, we describe our results and evaluate our approach. Finally, we conclude
our work and describe future work in “Conclusion” section.

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 4 of 17

Related work
The majority of approaches depending on CDRs to build the Telecom social network in
related work, where nodes (represented by customers) are connected by links (repre-
sented by calls/SMS’s or interactions). Onnela et al. [12] analyzed a weighted call graph
of mobile phone call records by examining its degree, strength, weight distributions,
clustering and weighted clustering, together with correlations between these quan-
tities. Nanavati et al. [13] analyzed the graph properties such degree distribution and
neighborhood distribution over time of calls and SMS networks. Mona et al. [14] pro-
posed a prototype that uses SNA to detect the communities of subscribers using two
phases. The first phase is community labeling by K-means algorithm [15] and the second
phase is community detection as a membership vector that identifies the community ID
to which every node belongs. They identified the most influential customers who can
spread positive or negative messages through the network using PageRank algorithm
[16] and recommended the best customer acquisitions to be targeted by marketing cam-
paigns. Nattapon et al. [17] proposed a data cleansing process for CDR in order to filter
the anomaly numbers. Moreover, they invented a measure to capture influencers based
on calling behaviors; their experiment was conducted on CDR’s of a Telecom operator in
Thailand. Wang et al. [18] proposed k-shell iteration factor which is a novel node ranking
measure to quantify the influence capability of nodes. This factor utilizes the iteration
information of k-shell decomposition to distinguish the influence capability of nodes
with the same k-shell value, which can help to discriminate the influence capability of
nodes more accurately and provide a more reasonable ranking list than other meas-
ures. Ahmed et al. [19] proposed a model based on SNA, which represented the data
warehouse that is continuously fed by switches and charging/billing systems. Central-
ity measures and behavioral attributes were calculated to facilitate equivalence analysis
between each pair of nodes. They also analyzed the way each node in the pair interacts
with other nodes in network basing on link attributes. In addition, they came up with a
score that was used in clustering the customers into Multi-SIM probability clusters for
the marketers to target. Zhan et al. [5] proposed a new way of calculating the most influ-
ential top-K communities in large networks using Katz centrality [20], which measures
the relative influence of each node in network by taking into account the node’s immedi-
ate neighbors. They calculated the average of Katz centrality for all communities instead
of using the traditional centrality measures.
Customer churn prediction models aim to detect customers with a high propensity
to leave the company [21], these churn prediction models have been widely used in the
Telecom companies to identify customers who are likely to churn and provide suitable
intervention to encourage them to stay [22]. Also, SNA features were used to enhance
the results of churn prediction models in Telecom domain after representing CDRs
data as a graph. Dasgupta et al. [23] used the SNA to study the evolution of churners in
the network over a period of time and explored the propensity of a subscriber to churn
depending on the number of friends who have already churned, Ahmad et al. [24] also
used SNA features to enhance the results of predicting the churn.
Sorić et al. [25] presented a prototype platform for SNA analysis in big data environ-
ment and gave an overview of the architectural integration in combination with multiple
technologies, frameworks and techniques through big data architecture. Moreover, they

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 5 of 17

used a platform of a combination of Spark GraphX1 framework and JavaScript2 for an

efficient social network analysis with different types of powerful and interactive visuali-
zations. Brdar et al. [26] provided an overview of all steps in discovering knowledge from
raw telecom data in the context of different applications, they also presented a discus-
sion about approaches that are analyzing mobile operators’ data sets via graph theory
and machine learning.
All previous related works are based on the calculation of centrality measures (Degree,
Closeness [10]: indicates how close a node is to all other nodes in the network, PageR-
ank, Katz centrality, ...) to detect influencers in small or medium scale networks, but
in large-scale networks some of these measures, such as Closeness and Katz centrality,
become insufficient because they are complex and difficult to calculate. Also, there are
some measures that incompatible with the nature of Telecom data such as PageRank
which is created for ranking web pages. Our contribution in this paper comes through
presenting new measures for detecting influencers that can be applied in large-scale
networks and compatible with Telecom data. In addition, we have tried to improve the
methods of detecting Multi-SIM customers by applying social network concepts which
considered a new way in this area. Previous studies in this domain are rare and limited in
detecting customers from the same operator using customers data only, while with the
new proposed method we can find Multi-SIM customers within the same operator and
across different operators by using the social network and customers data.
Our research is considered as the first of its kind that uses a real and big Telecom
dataset in Syria. The paper proposes a novel approach to detect influence subscribers
in the Telecom social network, this approach is depending on calculating eigenvector
and influence capability of node for each subscriber. The new approach is more accurate
and efficient than traditional methods that using only centrality measures as we’ll see
in “Results and discussion” section. Another new approach is presented in this paper:
Multi-SIM subscriber detection model, which is based on the idea of similarity between
nodes in the graph plus the mutual behavioral characteristics between customers.

Methods
This section describes the data sets used in this work, how we built social network and
the feature extraction methods.

Solution architecture
We have chosen Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP)3 as a big data platform to install and
use in the study. HDP is a free open-source framework under the Apache 2.0 License4
designed to deal with data from different sources and formats. It has a variety of open
source systems and tools such as:

1
https​://spark​.apach​e.org/graph​x/.
2
https​://www.javas​cript​.com.
3
https​://horto​nwork​s.com/.
4
https​://www.apach​e.org/licen​ses/LICEN​SE-2.0.

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 6 of 17

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)5: it is a Java-based, file system for storing
large volumes of data; it provides scalable and reliable data storage.
• Apache YARN6: it represents the processing layer for managing distributed applica-
tions that run on multiple machines in a network, it allows using various data pro-
cessing engines for batch, interactive and real-time stream processing of data stored
in HDFS, so YARN provides resource management while HDFS provides storage.
• Apache Spark7: A distributed, in-memory data processing engine designed for large-
scale data processing and analysis.
• Apache Zeppelin8: A web-based notebook which supports interactive data explora-
tion, visualization and collaboration.

We stored Data in HDFS as a spark DataFrame9 format which is a Dataset organized into
named columns; it is similar to data frame in R/Python or a table in a relational database,
but with more optimizations. We used Spark tools for processing data, building the tel-
ecom social network and calculating SNA features.

Data description and preparation

Four data sources were selected for our work:

1. Customer data: The customer data has been collected from CRM system, it contains
customer contract information (subscriber GSMs, subscription type, age, gender,
location ...). In addition to the above, the customer data also contains all services,
offers, packages that were subscribed by the customer.
2. Mobile IMEI information: It contains all information about the customer mobile
devise such model, brand and if the device is dual-SIM or not.
3. Call details records (CDRs): It contains all transactions and actions that were taken
by the customer; we selected for our work only data of calls. This data source is gen-
erated as text files.
4. Cells and towers information: it contains the information of actions location like lon-
gitude and latitude coordinates, sub-area, area and city.

We have exerted great effort in the process of collecting and clearing previous sources
of information due to the large volume of data and the variety of its sources. In addition
to collecting and clearing data, we had to understand and link all types of data so that
they can be used for our research. In the end, 3 months of data sets were prepared which
contained more than 10 million customers with their data and about one billion records
of calls between customers.
An ETL on CDRs were performed in a duration of 3 months and prepared using big
data platform HDP. Before the storage operation, the data were cleansed by eliminating
the irrelevant numbers from CDRs. These numbers were classified in three types: first

5
https​://hadoo​p.apach​e.org/docs/r3.1.1/hadoo​p-proje​ct-dist/hadoo​p-hdfs/HdfsD​esign​.html.
6
https​://hadoo​p.apach​e.org/docs/curre​nt/hadoo​p-yarn/hadoo​p-yarn-site/YARN.html.
7
https​://spark​.apach​e.org/.
8
https​://zeppe​lin.apach​e.org/.
9
https​://spark​.apach​e.org/docs/lates​t/sql-progr​ammin​g-guide​.html.

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 7 of 17

Table 2 Sample of detailed data

Calling number Called number Call duration (s) Start call time

963-9******08 963-9******92 330 21/11/2018 08:30:47 AM

963-9******43 963-9******17 138 21/11/2018 11:23:52 AM
963-9******21 963-9******49 212 21/11/2018 04:12:31 PM
963-9******76 963-9******19 99 21/11/2018 10:36:11 PM

Table 3 Sample of summarized data

Calling number Called number Calls duration (s) Calls count

963-9******14 963-9******22 4500 22

963-9******31 963-9******62 3257 18
963-9******94 963-9******11 7368 38
963-9******34 963-9******78 5327 29

type is call center numbers which are numbers that receive a lot of calls from massive
amount of other numbers but do not themselves make any calls. Second type is Telesales
numbers (the opposite behavior of call center numbers) which are numbers make a lot
of calls to a lot of numbers and don’t receive many calls back. The last type is the wrong
calls numbers which are numbers that received one call with short duration and didn’t
make any calls at all.
After cleansing operation, we stored two types data in HDFS:

• Detailed data: contains all calls in each day with time of the call and the duration.
This type of data is used to extract Multi-SIM subscribers model features. Table 2
shows a sample of detailed data.
• Summarized data: contains the aggregation of detailed data over 3 months consider-
ing direction of calls, each record contains calling and called part with number of all
their calls and total calls duration in the whole period. This type of data is used to
build the social network. Table 3 shows sample of summarized data.

Building social network

Summarized data was used as mentioned before to build the social network for 3 months
where nodes represent GSM numbers of subscribers and edges represent any interac-
tions between subscribers (calls in our case). The result was a direct graph which con-
tains about 16 million nodes and about 300 million edges. Figure 2 visualizes a sample
of our social network where size and color of nodes express ranking degrees and lines
between the nodes express ranking weights. We used Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm
[27] which is a force-directed layout algorithm for drawing the graph.
Weights were added to our graph where each edge carries a different weight. The calcu-
lated weights depend on the count and duration of all calls between each side of edge. In
order to unify weight over all the graph we normalized the duration of calls for each edge

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 8 of 17

Fig. 2 Visualization for a sample of the Telecom social network

Table 4 Sample of Telecom social network data

Source Destination Weight

963-9******14 963-9******22 0.0425

963-9******31 963-9******62 0.0496
963-9******94 963-9******11 0.0272
963-9******34 963-9******78 0.0335

by dividing to the max value of duration in the network and we did the same thing for the
count of calls. Finally, edges weight was calculated using the following equation:

W = α . DNorm + (1 − α) . NNorm (1)

where W represents edge weight, DNorm represents normalized duration of calls, NNorm
represents normalized number of calls and α represents the importance factor where
0 < α < 1. By choosing α > 0.5 we give duration of calls more importance than number
of calls and vice versa when α < 0.5. In our network, calls duration was considered a
little bit more important than calls number so we selected α = 0.6 and the calculated
weight must be 0 < W < 1. Table 4 shows sample of Telecom social network data.

Social network analysis features

With the help of social network analysis, Telecom companies can recognize the customer’s
behavior and predict the strength of relations among customers. We analyzed our social
network and calculated centrality measures. First, degree centrality (In-Degree, Out-
Degree, Degree) was calculated for each node. Neighborhood degree (ND) [28] which is the
node degree plus the sum degrees of node neighbors was also calculated, ND is given by the
equation:

ND(v) = d(v) + d(u)
(2)
u∈N (v)

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 9 of 17

Table 5 Sample of SNA centrality measures

Id (GSM) In-degree Out-degree Degree ND LCCF

963-9******14 0.039 0.024 0.042 0.02867 0.241417

963-9******31 0.134 0.165 0.1993 0.124 0.022958
963-9******94 0.108 0.085 0.1286 0.092 0.037237
963-9******34 0.021 0.011 0.0213 0.018 0.074074
963-9******89 0.050 0.051 0.0673 0.0453 0.120723

where d(v) is the degree of the node v and N (v) represents neighbors of node v. Another
calculated centrality measure is local clustering coefficient (LCC) [29], which indicates
how close the node’s neighbors are to be a clique (complete graph). This measure is given
by the equation:

 |N (v) ∩ N (u)|
LCC(v) = (3)
|N (v)| ∗ (|N (v)| − 1)
u∈N (v)

All calculated measures are normalized by dividing to the max value of each measure
over all the graph. Table 5 shows a sample of calculated SNA centrality measures.
The calculated SNA features (in-degree, out-degree, degree, ND, LCC) were used to
enhance the churn prediction models that used in the Telecom company by adding
social network features on top of the traditional churn predictors.

Detecting influencers
Previous measures can help find out the most influenced customers in the network but
they are not enough, so more measures were calculated to come up with an influence
score which expresses the importance of each node in the graph. This importance is
based on the strength of links with other nodes presented by eigenvector centrality (EV),
and the global location of the node within the graph presented by influence capability of
node (IC).
Eigenvector centrality measures a node’s importance while considering the impor-
tance of its neighbors; the main idea is that links from important nodes (as measured
by previous centrality measures) are more valuable than links from unimportant nodes.
All nodes start with equal EV value, but as the computation progresses, nodes with more
degree start gaining importance. This importance propagates out to the nodes to which
they are connected. After a number of computing iterations, the EV values stabilize and
give the final values for eigenvector centrality for all nodes. EV centrality is calculated by
using the equation:
n
1
EV (v) = Aij vj (4)

j=1

Where  is a constant scalar value and A is the adjacency matrix [30] which represents
the network mathematically and has values:

1 If there is an edge between vertices vi and vj
Aij =
0 Otherwise (5)

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 10 of 17

Table 6 Sample of EV and IC measures

Id EV IC

963-9******14 0.030832 0.241417

963-9******31 0.094961 0.022958
963-9******94 0.051983 0.037237
963-9******34 0.135877 0.074074
963-9******89 0.046235 0.120723

Edges weight was included in the calculations of EV by replacing the one values in adja-
cency matrix A with the edge weight.
Wang et al. [18] proposed an Influence Capability measure based on k-shell values and
the iteration information in the decomposition process to distinguish nodes with the
same ks values. As we see in Table 1 many nodes have the same ks values but different
locations in graph so their influence capability differs and nodes with higher iteration
values are closer to the core nodes. First, they proposed a k-shell iteration factor:
 n
δv = ks . 1+ (6)
m
where, ks is the k-shell value for node v, m is the total iteration number and v is the
removed node in the n-th iteration of the k-degree process. Then they proposed an influ-
ence capability factor defined as follows:

ICv = δv . Dv + δu . Du
(7)
u ǫ N (v)

where ICv represents the influence capability of node v, δv is the k-shell iteration factor of
node v, Dv is the degree of node v and N (v)represents neighbors of node v. The Influence
Capability factor IC contains the degree which is a local measure and the k-shell itera-
tion factor which is a global measure. Therefor, IC takes into consideration the local and
global influence capabilities of the node which help to distinguish between nodes more
accurately. We calculated EV and IC for all nodes in network and normalized values.
Table 6 shows a sample of calculated EV and IC measures.

Multi‑SIM subscribers model

There are only two major Telecom companies in our country, we have named the first
operator to which the data set belongs to as “Original operator”, the other operator has
been named as “Second operator”. We used the social network and detailed data to build
Multi-SIM subscribers’ model. First, we benefited from graph proprieties to find nodes
(subscribers) that share mutual nodes (neighbors) because the subscriber often calls the
same people from his different SIMs. Finding nodes with mutual neighbors is very com-
plex and expensive, so we simplified it by distributing calculations over periods of 10
days throughout the 3 months duration, and removing node pairs that share less than
three neighbors in each period. After finding node pairs that share neighbors, two filters
were added to the resulted data. The first filter removes pairs that have edges between
them because if the subscriber has two SIMs, it is rare that he calls from one of his SIMs
to the other SIM (calling himself ). The second filter removes pairs that have a number of

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 11 of 17

Table 7 Sample of calculated similarity SNA measures

Id1 Id2 SimJacc SimCos SimScore

963-9******14 963-9******72 0.241417 0.253801 0.247609

963-9******31 963-9******16 0.124975 0.149874 0.137425
963-9******94 963-9******11 0.291038 0.314238 0.302638
963-9******34 963-9******54 0.184251 0.196213 0.190232
963-9******89 963-9******37 0.312462 0.337125 0.324794

shared nodes less than the selected threshold. We selected 10 shared nodes as a thresh-
old. The next step in our Multi-SIM subscribers’ model was calculating two types of
measures: SNA similarity measures and SNA behavioral measures for each pair of nodes
after filtration step. SNA similarity [31] measures include the following:

• Jaccard measure: in this measure we normalize the number of shared neighbors

between two nodes based on the size of union of its two neighborhoods’. This meas-
ure is given by the equation:

|N (v) ∩ N (u)|
SimJacc (v , u) = (8)
|N (v) ∪ N (u)|

where N (v)represents neighbors of node v.

• Cosine measure: it is the cosine of the angle between the characteristic vectors of the
neighborhoods of two nodes. This measure is given by the equation:

|N (v) ∩ N (u)|
SimCos (v , u) = √ (9)
|N (v) | ∗ |N (u) |

We calculated a similarity score, which is the average between the two previous similar-
ity measures. The similarity score plays a main role to detect pairs that have high prob-
ability to be similar and exclude ones with low probability by filtering on a threshold (we
selected 0.1 threshold). Table 7 shows a sample of calculated similarity SNA measures.
SNA behavioral measures focus more on the behavior of each node of the pair with
the shared neighbors. We used detailed data to extract these measures and use them in
addition to similarity score to increase the probability. SNA behavioral measures include
the following:

• Common duration range: it represents the most common duration range of voice
calls with each node of the shared neighbors. Duration ranges are clustered into 6
groups:

– 0 to 4 min
– 5 to10 min
– 11 to 20 min
– 21 to 40 min
– 41 to 60 min
– More than 60 min

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 12 of 17

Fig. 3 Solution architecture cycle

• Common time of day: it represents the most common period of the day where a
voice call occurs with each node of the shared neighbors. The day is divided into 4
periods; and each period spans 6 h:

– Period 1: 00:00 a.m. to 06:00 a.m.

– Period 2: 06:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
– Period 3: 12:00 p.m. to 06:00 p.m.
– Period 4: 06:00 p.m. to 00:00 a.m.

• Common day of week: it represents the most common day of week where a voice call
occurs with each node of the shared neighbors.

A friend is considered as a mutual behavioral friend when he has at least two of the
behavioral measures with the same values with each side of the pair.
In addition to previous SNA measures, two other measures were used: subscriber
location and IMEI. The operator can only records location and IMEI for its subscribers,
as a result we can use these information only for detecting similarities between subscrib-
ers in the same operator. Subscribers often switch between their SIMs using the same
mobile device, so IMEI can be used as an indicator of similarity between subscribers
who have the same IMEI value. Subscriber location can help also as IMEI by identify-
ing the most common places where the subscriber resides (home and job). We extracted
these measures for pairs whose their two nodes are from the same operator using cus-
tomer data, mobile IMEI information and towers information to increase accuracy in
detecting similar subscribers.

Results and discussion

Performance
Performance usually plays a key role in the success of analytical models similar to our
model, so the solution was designed to deliver high performance and speed, especially
with ETL activities and SNA operations. HDP framework was installed and customized
with a variety of systems and tools such as Hadoop, Spark, Yarn and Zeppelin. It con-
tained eight nodes, eight Terabyte storage capacity, 32 Gigabyte RAM and eight core
processors for each node. Figure 3 represents the solution architecture cycle.

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 13 of 17

Fig. 4 Frequency distribution of degrees types

Using Spark is very useful for ETL processing and analytics because of its ability to per-
form calculations in-memory. This allows Spark to be faster than MapReduce and more
efficient in batch and interactive processing of SQL queries. In addition, Spark supports
several programming languages including Scala, Java, Phyton and R. Spark abilities were
used to build the social network of 3 months CDRs provided by the Telecom company
and to store network nodes and edges in HDFS as DataFrames that facilitates processing
operations in the next steps. A window of 3-month data was chosen to build the network
due to the limitation in capabilities of framework hardware and the complexity of SNA
operations. The complexity of SNA comes from iterative calculations (LCCF, EV and IC)
which need a massive memory to save all previous iterations. To solve this problem, cal-
culation algorithms were modified by storing each iteration output and loading it to the
next step with updating the iteration output each time to save the storage. Another per-
formance challenge in SNA was finding node pairs that have mutual neighbors, which
consumed memory very fast. To overcome this challenge calculations were distributed
on 10-days periods over all 3-month duration as we mentioned before. We considered
the max range of each period is 10 days according to the experiments we did. Any period
range more than 10 days had failed due to hardware limitations.

Accuracy
Network was built and weighed according to the marketing needs in the operating com-
pany which cares more about call duration than calls number. Figure 4 presents the fre-
quency distribution of in-degree, out-degree and degree, where frequency distribution is
the fraction of nodes in the network with different types of degrees. All the charts (a), (b)
and (c) in Fig. 4 are plotted in log-log scale with types of degrees on the X-axis and the
number of nodes on the Y-axis, we chose the log-log scale for its suitability to represent
the large range of degree values. The distribution in the figure demonstrates a power law

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 14 of 17

Table 8 Multi-SIM detection model results

Condition Pairs operator type Result (%)

SNA similarity measures (Original-Operator, Second-Operator) 68

SNA similarity measures + SNA behavioral measures (Original-Operator, Second-Operator) 76
SNA similarity measures (Original-Operator, Original-Operator) 74
SNA similarity measures + SNA behavioral measures (Original-Operator, Original-Operator) 85
SNA similarity measures + SNA behavioral measures + (Original-Operator, Original-Operator) 92
additional measures

behavior with exponents 3.017 for in-degree, 3.02 for out-degree and 3.085 for degree.
The figure also shows that the distribution of the types of degrees gives similar results
that there are very few nodes which have very high degrees. Therefore, these nodes may
be suitable for individual targeting by a Telecom service provider.
A research analysis has been done by using our results together with data of the most
common locations of customers. We have selected randomly a sample of 50,000 cus-
tomers belong to the same city from our social network. A 15% highest-ranked influ-
ence customers’ group were chosen from the sample depending on the EV and IC scores,
which represent the importance of customer in the network, we called this group as
influence group. Another 15% customers’ group were chosen from the remaining sam-
ple but this time randomly, we called it the random group. The influence group and the
random group were targeted by a particular bundle purchasing campaign. Considering
the subsequently forward 2 months, we have monitored customers who subscribed in
the new bundle from the social network related to each group. The result of applying
the campaign was that a 16,245 new customers have purchased the new bundle from the
social network related to the random group and 22,255 new customers have purchased
the new offer from the social network related to the influence group, which mean a 37%
raise in number of customers who subscribed in the new offer included in the campaign.
Also, there was a 30% raise in growth rate of mobile traffic of the new customers from
the social network related to the influence group comparing to the new customers from
the social network related to the random group. According to the past methods, the cus-
tomer influence score has presented additional gains in terms of business effectiveness
and performance.
The results of Multi-SIM detection model contained more than 1.5 million records
of pairs with similarity score greater than 0.1 and mutual friends greater than 10. We
split the result into two groups: the first group contained pairs from the same operator
(Original-Operator, Original-Operator). The second group contained pairs from the two
different operators (Original-Operator, Second-Operator). From each group we selected
the 25% of highest-ranking subscribers in similarity score before and after applying SNA
behavioral measures. The condition of behavioral measures was selecting pairs that have
5 mutual behavioral friends at least. The same process was also done with the first group
(Original-Operator, Original-Operator) again but this time the additional factors were
added (subscriber location and IMEI). We chose only pairs which have identical location
or IMEI. The model can be tested in two ways: first by making direct calls to subscrib-
ers in previous groups with a questionnaire about the number of lines that subscriber

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 15 of 17

possesses and to which operator each line belongs or second by using the customer
data. Table 8 represents the results we have obtained. The traditional methods used in
detecting Multi-SIM subscribers were able to detect subscribers only in the same opera-
tor based on customer data with a success rate between 30 and 40%, but by using our
Multi-SIM detection model we have achieved a better results within the same operator
and across different operators. Table 8 shows that using SNA similarity measures gave
good results in detecting Multi-SIM subscribers and it’s getting better when pairs are
from the same operator (Original-Operator, Original-Operator). This can be explained
by the fact that we have the whole network for Original-Operator subscribers where
pairs are (Original-Operator, Original-Operator), but in the other case when pairs are
(Original-Operator, Second-Operator) part of the network is missing (Second-Operator
to Second-Operator calls).
Also the results show that using SNA behavioral measures increased the accuracy
of the model with pairs from both same and different operators, the reason for this is
that Multi-SIM subscribers rarely change their behavioral actions with the same peo-
ple when contacting from different SIMs. We got the max result when we applied SNA
similarity and behavioral measures in addition to location and IMEI of subscriber on the
pairs from the same operator (Original-Operator, Original-Operator) and that’s logical
because we add more filtration constrains to our dataset.
In summary, the overall evaluation of our models shows that the social network analy-
sis features gave us more accurate results in detecting influencers and Multi-SIM sub-
scribers than the results obtained by the traditional methods.
The limitation of this work is represented by the window of data we choose for build-
ing the network (3 months CDRs) and the type of CDRs we use (calls CDRs only). We
were unable to increase the width of the data window more than 3 months also we could
not handle other types of CDRs (like SMS or internet CDRs) due to the massive amount
of data we have to collect as well as the complexity of SNA operations that consume a
large amount of storage and memory.
This work could be improved by getting rid of previously mentioned limitations and
adding other data sources like SMS and Internet CDRs, so the data set would be larger
and more suitable for building the social network and the models will be more robust
and accurate. Finally SNA can play a main role in the analysis of Telecom data from the
social point of view.

Conclusion
This paper presents a new prototype for building a social network on a big data platform
using Telecom data by weighing and analyzing it. It also presents two models: influenc-
ers detection model and Multi-SIM detection model taking advantage of the built net-
work. In influencers detection model we present a new way to measure the importance
of subscribers by calculating eigenvector and influence capability of node rather than
following the standard approach using centrality measures. This model was tested by
targeting the highest ranking influencers. More accuracy and sufficiency were achieved
than those obtained in classic ways with a 30% raise in growth rate of mobile traffic. In
Multi-SIM detection model we benefited form the idea of mutual friends to calculate
the similarity score and the behavioral score and use them to find pairs of SIMs (in the

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Al‑Molhem et al. J Big Data (2019) 6:99 Page 16 of 17

same or different operators) that are probably similar and came to 85% accuracy result.
The location and IMEI of subscriber were also used to increase the accuracy of results
for pairs from the same operator and achieved 92% accuracy result. Finally, we see that
SNA can help in Telecom industry for planning the right offers and studying the behav-
ior of customers. There are also a lot of Telecom topics such as customers communities,
fraud detection and advertising campaigns are worth pursuing and analyzing using SNA
techniques.

Abbreviations
SNA: social network analysis; CDR: call detail record; SMS: short message service; SIM: subscriber identification module;
ETL: Extracting,Transforming and Loading Data; GSM: Global System for Mobile communications; HDP: Hortonworks Data
Platform; HDFS: Hadoop Distributed File System; ks: location index of the node in the graph; W: edge weight; DNorm: nor‑
malized duration of calls; NNorm: normalized number of calls; α: importance factor; ND: neighborhood degree; d: degree
of node v; N(v): neighbors of node v; LCC: local clustering coefficient; EV: eigenvector centrality; A: adjacency matrix; 
: constant scalar value; δv: k-shell iteration factor; IC: influence capability of node; SimJacc: Jaccard similarity score; SimCos:
cosine similarity score; IMEI: International Mobile Equipment Identity; RAM: random access memory.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Syriatel and Mr. Adham Troudi for support and motivation. Thanks for Mr. Mhd Assaf, Mr.william Sou‑
laiman, Mr. Ammar Asaad, and Miss. Marwa Hanhoun for their co-operation and help.

Authors’ contributions
NRA-M took the main role of performing the literature review, built the Telecom social network and implemented the
proposed models. He conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript. YR and MD took on a supervisory role and
oversaw the completion of the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding
The authors declare that they have no funding.

Availability of data and materials

The data is not available to public because of Telecom company restriction applied on it, since the data were used under
the license for the current study.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All authors give ethics approval and consent to participate in submission and review process.

Consent for publication

The authors consent for publication.

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Received: 17 July 2019 Accepted: 4 November 2019

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