Is there a way to disentangle (maybe not perfectly) a work trip from a consumption trip?

Questions & Help
1

Hi – with the current foot traffic data available for POI available for download from safegraph, is there a way to disentangle (maybe not perfectly) a work trip from a consumption trip? For example, for a particular POI, the data tells me, how many people are from different home_cbg, but I don’t know whether these people from a home location X is visiting a POI Y for work purpose or a consumption purpose. I have thought about using weekdays vs. weekend visitors, but this variable doesn’t tell me the breakdown by visitors’ home_cbg. Ang suggestion is much appreciated!

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

2

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

3

Hey ! Great question. See the post below from Jeff. We usually recommend filtering out long duration visits using bucketed dwell times.

4

Niki’s right - great question. Unfortunately, there’s not a perfect way to do this based on the columns we currently surface. You could try using Neighborhood patterns, which gives you the home areas of people who visited at certain times of day (as a proxy for work vs consumption), but that’s not at the POI level.

If you need the POI level, you could try to pick a week from Weekly Patterns where you know most people came for work, and then use visitor_home_cbgs from that week. (Or the opposite - pick a week where you know most people come for consumption, maybe the holidays?)

5

A couple of follow-up questions on this:

6

For the variable “visitor_home_cbgs”, if I see “360810450001”:10, then this means 10 people from this home block visited a POI. Is this interpretation correct? Is there a way to find out the number of visits by these 10 people?

7

Also, I found that when I add up the number of visitors from each home_cbgs, and compare that number to the variable “raw_visitor_counts”, there are quite some discrepancies, why is that?

8

Hey 1. Yes. Your interpretation is correct. See Patterns | SafeGraph Docs. We don’t currently surface visits by home. If this is critical to your application, you can communicate why it is useful and we might incorporate it into a future release. In the meantime, what you can do is multiply by the average visits/visitor from the poi to get an estimated visit count per each home_cbg visitor.
2. See this response from June 21 about why visitor_home_cbg is different: Slack

9

Hey ! 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!