Is there information for how to scale the Safegraph data to actual population numbers?

Is there information for how to scale the Safegraph data to actual population numbers? We are working on a specific city in Massachusetts and were hoping to estimate at the population level if possible.

@Anne_Hudson_MIT What parameters are you trying to scale here? I’ve seen previous research scaling it by a factor of population/device.

@Ruowei_Yang_UM_Baltimore thanks for reaching out. i am trying to scale the number of visits to businesses from safegraph users to the actual population. i’m wondering if there is data on what percentage of the population has apps that safegraph can track?

@Anne_Hudson_MIT I think the number of devices are dynamic, since there are always people opting in and out. I saw a previous article saying the scaling factor they took was the ratio of 328 million US population over 46.8 million devices tracked, but that is for the entire nation. You can find more about this in the description of the “total_devices_seen” in the “normalization stats” section on this page: Weekly Patterns | SafeGraph Docs You can also check the number of devices in SafeGraph data during the specific time of your interest in your city. On the same page above, there is a description of the “number_devices_residing” by census block group. You can select all the CBGs in your city and aggregate. With the number of devices in your city showing up in SafeGraph, then you might construct a scaling factor based on that and the true population of the city.

@Ruowei_Yang_UM_Baltimore I’m having tackling a similar problem as above. Could you tell me where to find the [home_panel_summary.csv] mentioned in your link? I have downloaded the standard dataset and haven’t found this file. Any help would be appreciated.