Trade Areas
Definition
Trade Areas describe the origin of visitors to a specific location of interest based on their home or work location. The origin area is defined as either a Census Block Group (CBG) or a ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA).
People Fraction
The people fraction shows the percentage breakdown of visitors from each origin based on their home or work location. For instance, this metric describes the percentage of the location visitors having their home in a specific CBG or ZCTA.
Trade Areas describe the home and work origins for all the visitors to a location.
You might in some cases encounter records with people_fraction = 0.0, this might happen as we trim this number to 3 decimal points. If you encounter this it means the origin is estimated to account for <0.1% of visits to the location while still having at >500 visits.
What questions does it answer?
- From how far does the location attract visitors?
- Where do the majority of visitors to a location live or work?
- What proportion of visits to a location come from visitors' home areas versus work areas?
- Which locations rely heavily on local visitors versus visitors from farther away trade areas?
- How does the visit pattern from certain trade areas change in response to external factors (e.g., local events or holidays)?
Methodology
Trade Areas are based on our new machine learning model. To define the person_fraction, we use two data sources as inputs into our model: 1st party GPS data and historical origin/destination strength.
The aggregates which are based on our 1st party GPS utilize Unacast's proprietary supply correction, extrapolation, and Home & Work algorithm.
Underlying Contexts in the Model
We use multiple sources of context as features in our machine learning model to estimate the people fraction. Some of these are:
- Number of people in the vicinity
- Home and Work aggregates per Hexagon
- Origin-Destination metrics
- Historical data
- People at a location