Why are there visits to a POI before the opening date?

Hi there, I have a question regarding the variable ‘number of visits/visitors’ in the monthly patterns data in Safegraph. For many POIs, there is still number of visits/visitors before the opening date recorded by Safegraph, I wonder if there is imputation of foot traffic by Safegraph. If so, how Safegraph does the imputation of number of visits?


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Hey @Qianyang_Zhang_Columbia_University - can you share any example POIs that you’re seeing this with?

sg:0006c78006c74e7d8e16abb40e4dfb8a is one example, it has raw_visit_counts starting from Jan 2018, but the Safegraph-recorded opening date is Jan 2020

What’s the placekey for this POI?

222-223@undefined x4-4vr-w8v

Hey @Qianyang_Zhang_Columbia_University - looking at this Placekey and I’m not seeing the same issue. Looks like 222-223@undefined x4-4vr-w8v is a Baskin Robbins in Core Places and opened_on is Null.

If you haven’t already, you might check out the Determining When POI Open and Close section in our docs page. We started tracking open/close in 2019-07, so all entries in these columns will be after this date. It’s possible that there’s Patterns data preceding 2019-07 for some POIs. However, that indicates that the POI would have opened before 2019-07.