Advan Research - FAQ, Citation Requirements, and External Resources

Use this thread to ask any general questions about the Advan data.

FAQ

Is the Advan Research dataset included in the Dewey subscription?
Yes, the Advan datasets are included

Citation Requirements

This data was made available by Advan Research (https://advanresearch.com/) via the Dewey Data platform. (https://www.deweydata.io/)

Research initially conducted using SafeGraph’s Patterns data and completed using Advan should cite Advan as the source. More here:

Resources

  • Advan Patterns data schemas (Monthly, Weekly, and Neighborhood) available by request to jake@deweydata.io

Hello,

I am looking for the documentation of Advan data and I can’t find it anywhere on the site. Should I use the documentation from SafeGraph as a reference if the Advan documentation is not available? Thanks.

Best,
Lejane

I just sent you an email with the documentation attached.

Related: Where can I find the Metadata?

Here is a link to the documentation: Documentation (Public) - Google Drive

I am writing to inquire about the census block group (cbg) data that is being used in the monthly pattern dataset. Specifically, I am interested in knowing which year of the cbg data is being used for the 2019 and 2022 monthly pattern datasets.

Could you please confirm which year of the census block group data the monthly pattern dataset is used for aggregation? Knowing this information would be very helpful for my analysis.

Thank you for your assistance.

@lejanek I found this documentation from SafeGraph about the CBGs they use. I believe Advan used the same source when they transferred over this product. Looks like 2016 vintage of the 2010 - 2019 CBG data. Hope that helps

1 Like

What is the best way to get in touch with someone at Advan regarding the academic data? I need to discuss a licensing question.

When I try to use the Contact Us form on their website, I get an error saying “Please provide a corporate email address.” I have no idea what that means; I’m providing my university email. Can someone help?

Hi @Chris_UCLA, their data is available for academics with a Dewey subscription. I’d be happy to chat about this more if you need: evan@deweydata.io

I am looking at the sample for the weekly patterns dataset and I have noticed several things which I need to clear up before being able to use this data for my research:

  1. Although the rows are supposed to represent POIs in cities, some boroughs of New York City also appear with their own entries (Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens). The general New York City entries also cover POIs in those boroughs, so why is this separation made just for some datapoints and why is Manhattan excluded?

  2. When looking at the POI spatial distribution, I noticed that for New York City, Queens is very poorly covered compared to the other boroughs. This drastic heterogeneity makes any analysis of New York City not valid. There is a similar problem with Montréal, which has some regions with no POIs at all. Is there some mistake and this data should be somewhere, or what is the reason for this?

  3. In general, when plotting the coordinates of each POI, I noticed that there are always several datapoints that do not belong to the city (sometimes not even the region) that they are supposed to belong to. What is the reason for this and how can it be fixed?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Can you try checking the SafeGraph Places data to see if you’re seeing the same issues with POI coverage and locations in that dataset?

Advan relies on the SafeGraph’s POI data to compute Patterns. This will help us determine if that trends your seeing are from the underlying POI data, or in the computation of Patterns.

As a note, Patterns is only computed on a subset of total POI since they need to reach a certain threshold of visits from the mobile panel to qualify to be added to the Patterns product.

I am planning to purchase your monthly pattern data through Dewey. However, when expIoring for the free data, I found some missing values for the key variable “raw_visit_counts”, especially for the sub_category of “Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores.” I would like to understand the reason for this missing value.

Hi @yucheng.wang143 - mind providing a little more about what’s missing in the data vs. expectation? Is it that there are certain POI that have Patterns data, but are missing that one attribute? Or that not all POI of this sub_category have Patterns data? I know that for privacy purposes, most providers will not include visits data if the count from their panel data is only a few visitors per month.

Thanks for your reply. I am looking at the Advan monthly pattern data. Let’s say electricity charging stations, which belong to the sub_category of “Other Gasoline Stations”. All of them are missing the attribute “raw_visit_counts”. I wonder if it is because electricity charging stations do not allow to share of visits data

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q89owxb7g2jo28mv76yum/Screen-Shot-2023-06-27-at-12.29.34-PM.png?dl=0&rlkey=pbxuw7urc2do570uebrl1o5o0

I believe that’s because EV charging stations are Point POI (Transit Stops, ATMs, Charging Stations, & More | SafeGraph Places). Because they don’t have a geometry, it’s impossible to attributes visits to the location.

I see. Thank you for this information

Hi,

Where can I get the crosswalk between the safegraph_place_id and the placekey? It seems that safegraph_place_id has been replaced with placekey. I am unable to find the crosswalk file.

Hi @elliotoh, unfortunately there is no way to create a safegraph_place_id ↔ Placekey crosswalk.

The Place ID was retired in July 2021. Since then, the POI’s in the data have gone through a number of additions, drops, changes, etc., so there is no way to create a crosswalk file that would be reasonably accurate or have good coverage.