If I'm comparing raw visit counts (Patterns) from two POI's in different states and in the same month, is it necessary to do any normalization?

Hello safegraph team. Fairly new to the datasets. Question on normalization. If I’m comparing raw visit counts (patterns) from two POI’s in different states and in the same month, is it necessary to do any normalization? Thx! Todd

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Hi Thanks for reaching out! We are looking into it and will get back to you once we have an answer.

Hi - thanks for the question! I’ll first point you to some resources we have on normalization first. In particular, the notebook on Simple Methods for Normalizing SafeGraph Patterns Data Over Time might be helpful.

https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/data-science-resources#section-panel-normalization-for-longitudinal-[…]s-sampling-bias-corrections-and-extrapolation

If the raw visit counts look reasonable to you and/or you can compare to some heuristic based on your domain knowledge, then you may not need to do normalization. But our panel per state can also vary in the same way that the panel can vary over time, so you may want to.

In general, we encourage you to try out a few methods and use knowledge of your own application to see.

Hi ! Just confirming that we answered your question. I’m going to 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 safegraphdata, as we aren’t monitoring old threads at this time. Thanks!