Cited by 100Human Mobility and Location-Based AnalysisContext-Aware Activity Recognition SystemsInnovative Human-Technology Interaction

Sensing Behavioral Change over Time: Using Within-Person Variability Features from Mobile Sensing to Predict Personality Traits

Wang, Weichen, Harari, Gabriella M., Wang, Rui, Müller, Sandrine R., Mirjafari, Shayan, Masaba, Kizito, Campbell, Andrew T.·2018·Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Abstract

Personality traits describe individual differences in patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving ("between-person" variability). But individuals also show changes in their own patterns over time ("within-person" variability). Existing approaches to measuring within-person variability typically rely on self-report methods that do not account for fine-grained behavior change patterns (e.g., hour-by-hour). In this paper, we use passive sensing data from mobile phones to examine the extent to which within-person variability in behavioral patterns can predict self-reported personality traits. Data were collected from 646 college students who participated in a self-tracking assignment for 14 days. To measure variability in behavior, we focused on 5 sensed behaviors (ambient audio amplitude, exposure to human voice, physical activity, phone usage, and location data) and computed 4 within-person variability features (simple standard deviation, circadian rhythm, regularity index, and flexible regularity index). We identified a number of significant correlations between the within-person variability features and the self-reported personality traits. Finally, we designed a model to predict the personality traits from the within-person variability features. Our results show that we can predict personality traits with good accuracy. The resulting predictions correlate with self-reported personality traits in the range of r = 0.32, MAE = 0.45 (for Openness in iOS users) to r = 0.69, MAE = 0.55 (for Extraversion in Android users). Our results suggest that within-person variability features from smartphone data has potential for passive personality assessment.

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Crossref · 10.1145/3264951

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72 of 72 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Research has shown that participant's behavior and sociodemographics may differ between Android platforms and other mobile platforms such as iOS.

    “Research has shown that participant’s behavior and sociodemographics may differ between Android platforms and other mobile platforms such as iOS [44,95].”
  • Of 105 consenting students, 92 opted to be scanned, and 75 of the 92 scanned subjects met the mobile sensing data quality criteria of 18 hours per day for at least 14 days.

    “of the 105 students consenting to be part of the NeuroSence study only 92 opted to be scanned at the start of the semester. In addition, only 75 of the 92 scanned subjects met the mobile sensing data quality criteria [100] of 18 hours of sensing data per day for a minimum of 14 days across the term.”

    From Predicting Brain Functional Connectivity Using Mobile Sensing (2020) · cites this paper as [100]

  • Mobile sensing data quality criteria exclude data with less than 18 hours of data per day and less than 14 days of data during the term.

    “Specifically, in terms of mobile sensing data we exclude data with less than 18 hours [100] of data per day and less than 14 days of data during the term.”

    From Predicting Brain Functional Connectivity Using Mobile Sensing (2020) · cites this paper as [100]

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Authors
Wang, W., Harari, G. M., Wang, R., Müller, S. R., Mirjafari, S., Masaba, K., & Campbell, A. T.
Affiliations
  • Dartmouth College (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
Venue
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Published
2018-09-18
Volume
2
Issue
3
Pages
1-21
ISSN
2474-9567 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2890085824
Cited by
100
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 31 · 2019: 11
FWCI
18.87
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (publishedVersion)
Funders
National Science Foundation (BCS-1520288)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Transportation › Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
Keywords
within-person variability, personality traits, passive sensing, smartphone sensing, self-tracking, behavioral change over time, circadian rhythm, regularity index, physical activity, location data, personality prediction, openness, extraversion

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