Has anyone done any data exploration with Google’s Mobility Reports and comparing it to SafeGraph data? Google’s mobility data can go down as far as county per state and it tracks things like visits to the broad categories such as grocery stores, parks, ect. I think it would be interesting to compare the difference in mobility trends between Google’s data and SafeGraph data aggregated to the county level.
we’ve had some researchers compared SG and google mobility report data and shown generally aligned results, but I can’t remember the specific people/studies. i don’t think anything highly systematic was done. having a whitepaper/report on this topic would be very interesting.
I would think Google has some advantages in accuracy (in those respective POI buckets), due to Google Maps having so many users, but it would be interesting to see for myself.
Hi Brian – we have a preprint where we utilized Google Mobility and SG data on parks: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/9xzgf/. The general pattern of results using the two datasets were very similar, but the focus was not to validate one measure with the other. We also only reported the SG data in the Supplemental Material since there were a lot of missing parks at the time – my understanding is that park visitation patterns will soon be backfilled on the more extensive set of parks that SG now includes.
The supplement to this recent paper finds a high correlation between SafeGraph and Google mobility data in 15 urban areas Mobility network models of COVID-19 explain inequities and inform reopening | Nature
> Across the 15 regions, we found that the median Pearson correlation was 0.96 for Retail & 27 recreation, 0.79 for Grocery & pharmacy, and 0.88 for Residential.