Quick question about the device_home_areas variable in the Neighborhood Patterns datasets

Hi All,

Quick question about the device_home_areas variable in the Neighborhood Patterns datasets. For instance, let a cell phone have a home area in census block group (CBG) A and commute to CBG B for work. Then, from CBG B, that user makes a visit to CBG C and from CBG C the user returns to CBG A. How will this movement appear in the in device_home_areas variable:

• Will there be 2 trips one from CBG A to CBG B and one from CBG A to CBG C?
• Or will the second trip from CBG B to CBG C not be recorded in the data?
In general, is it possible to use any of the variables in Neighborhood Patterns to gain a better idea of long sequential movements for devices, or do we only have movements from one origin to one destination ignoring what actual movements have been made in between?

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

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

Hey - I’m bringing in someone from our Product team for specifics on this. We’ll get back to you soon with an answer. Thanks!

Hi ! I saw that you asked a similar question a few months back. Going to drop that thread below. Does this answer your question?

Hi Niki,

Unfortunately, I can’t access the link attached.

Hi ! Apologies - must have pasted the wrong link. Dropping link below:

Hi Niki,

Thanks for the new link! I think the questions I asked in the old thread are slightly different than the question I had above; I think the difference is that in the question above I was wondering if in reality, the trips A -> B -> C have happened and A is the home census block group of the device, how would these stops be recorded in the Neighborhood Patterns data?

As far as I understand the structure of Neighborhood Patterns, then we should see one record of a stop at B from a device with home census block group B and one record of a stop at C from a device with home census block group A. However, I just wanted to confirm if this would be a correct understanding of the data.

Hey - thanks for verifying. Just wanted to double-check. I’ve looped in our Product team to get you an answer on this. We’ll back to you with any updates. Thanks!

Hi , if someone went from A -> B -> C, a stop would be recorded in all three in raw_stop_counts and raw_device_counts , and CBG A would appear as a device_home_area for all three.

If CBG B was indeed their regular daytime location, then CBG B would appear as a device_daytime_areas for all three as well.

In general, the data aren’t really that useful for thinking of “trips” in the way you’re thinking of them. We don’t record any data really on sequence (i.e., A then B then C). The same data above could appear if they went from A -> C -> B, or any other combination.

So, to answer your broader question, long sequences of movement data do show up in the data and we aren’t merely recording origin/destination pairs. However, it is not possible to tease out those patterns due to the CBG-level aggregation and the device-level anonymization. This is basically by design: the data are intended to provide information more about places, not trips or people.

Thanks !

Hi @U01S615Q7E0 - 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!