Company
Date Published
Author
Kieran Gupta, Movement Team
Word count
1454
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Mapbox Movement is a data product leveraging aggregated, anonymized GPS telemetry from various apps to analyze human density trends over time and space, proving useful for academic research and business operations, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. By calibrating this data through a median-across-apps approach, Mapbox can mitigate the biases and fluctuations caused by app churn and demographic differences, providing more accurate representations of activity levels than raw device density alone. This method involves calculating median curves over larger spatial and temporal scales and then interpolating these to finer granularities, ensuring the data's reliability and applicability across different regions and times. An example from Japan during the early months of the pandemic illustrates how this calibration process effectively captures real-world activity changes despite the introduction of new data sources, maintaining stable trends and allowing for meaningful comparisons. The product, which covers global data over several years, supports scalable analysis by interpolating data across varying spatial hierarchies, making it accessible for those interested in exploring movement patterns.