Are weekly pattern and social distancing metrics available in the shop?

Questions & Help
1

Hey, I would like to ask some questions about the data availability of the weekly pattern and social distancing metrics. I could not find them in shop.

This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.

2

Please refer to this thread:

https://safegraph-community.slack.com/archives/C0109NPA543/p1634646227481900

3

Thanks for pointing it out. Just to clarify a few things:

  1. To my understanding, variables like distance travelled measuring the variation in the general mobility is not available at the moment. We could only use the fluctuation of visits to certain NAICS categories to approximate it?
  2. Seems like the only difference between weekly and monthly patterns is the frequency how they’re delivered? All variables and measures are the same. So I could use monthly patterns to approximate the social distancing metrics as well?
  3. You said weekly pattern would be in the shop towards the end of the October in the thread. I did not see it in the shop, so it’s delayed?
    Thanks!!!
4
  1. Correct - Patterns data aggregates foot traffic to the POI. Not necessarily general mobility.
  2. Weekly and Monthly Patterns are from the same underlying data source. Key difference, as you mentioned, is that it’s aggregated on a weekly or monthly level.
  3. Weekly Patterns release has been slightly delayed. However, you can pull Weekly Patterns through the Places API ahead of it’s release in Shop.
5

thanks! One last question about something abnormal I noticed from the pattern data. Some places have extremely low visits per month, which doesn’t feel like it’s because they’re extremely not popular. I see from FAQ that it be might due to accurate geometry. Is it the only reason for this case? And would you recommend me to drop the observations from my analysis?

6

It’s certainly possible that the geometry might be off therefore the visits are also off. Did you look at the geometry for that POI?

7

I’m not very familiar with the geometry of a POI, could you elaborate more? Thanks

8

SafeGraph’s Geometry data provides POI footprints and spatial hierarchy metadata. They map the size and area of physical locations for the POIs using polygons. If you go through Shop, you’ll notice that you’ll have to purchase Geometry. However, it is a free dataset. You might check the Geometry and see if the polygon looks correct.

9

I see. What if I am not familiar with the place? I can see not a few cases in the data for NYC like that. How could I distinguish which is really due to the incorrect geometry?

10

Again, Geometry could be one of a few reasons why visits could be low. Remember that our panel of devices is a subset of the whole U.S. Population, so when you get to the level of individual POIs, our panel ends up having varying coverage of the people who actually visit such places. These are outliers, for sure, and would recommend omitting them if you were doing any brand or category-level aggregation (e.g., if looking visits to all Prada stores, omit this particular POI).

11

To prevent any further questions from being overlooked, I’ll go ahead and close this thread out. If you have any more questions or follow-up questions, we’re always here to help! Just be sure to make a new post to help, as we aren’t monitoring old threads at this time. Thanks!