Is there any work already made with predicting number of visits by POI?

Questions & Help
1

Is there any work already made with predicting number of visits by POI? What models of machine learning would you recommend for this goal (predicting daily number of visits by POI)

2

Hi @Angel_Langdon, I’m not aware of any machine learning models that have been used to predict the daily number of visits to a POI, but have you seen the Data Science Resources? There are a couple resources that describe methods for estimating true counts from SafeGraph’s data. The best approach right now is “CBG micro-normalization”, where the raw visit counts are adjusted based on the # of SafeGraph devices and US Census population in the visitor home CBGs.

The difficult part of building a machine learning model is that true counts data is hard to come by. Another challenge is that predicting true visits for a specific POI can be noisy; predicting for an entire brand tends to yield more reliable results.

However, we are constantly trying to improve the methods!

3

Thank you very much! We will apply the CBG micro-normalization, and later when we have all our data features will try to predict the number of visits.

4

You’re welcome! Let me know how it goes!

5

Hi!, We have applied CBG micro-normalization and with a simple regression model we have obtained 0.65 pearson coefficient, which is pretty good considering that we are using a simple regression model…

6

Hi @Angel_Langdon, that is pretty solid! What types of locations are you using? Do you have true counts for the predictions?

7

We are using patterns data from Subways in Houston between 2020-03 until now.
Sorry, I am from Spain thus I am not really really good at English, what do you mean by true counts for the predictions?

8

@Angel_Langdon, no worries, I think your English is excellent! I was just wondering if you are working with locations that have “true counts” data available. For example, airports publish the number of people who get on a plane each day. With the true counts of visitors, you are able to build a model that more accurately predicts the number of visitors from SafeGraph data. I was just curious if you had that data or not. Sorry for the confusion!