LEADERS' OUTLOOK
The Importance of Accuracy and Precision in Curating a Source of Truth BY LAUREN SPIEGEL
Senior Vice President of Product, SafeGraph
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ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
ocation data is becoming fundamental to decision-making for businesses, and the demand for location and business analytics has taken off. As more companies become data savvy, having an accurate, up-to-date dataset about physical places has value for a growing set of use cases.
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Consequently, a majority of data analysis platforms are developing native geospatial capabilities in-house; Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Alteryx have all incorporated geospatial functions into their platforms. We expect this trend to continue as more and more users now want to perform geospatial data analysis alongside other data science work, instead of moving between different platforms. As a result, business intelligence companies are leaning into geospatial data science and are increasingly bringing in specialized talent to do so. You will even see some of these data companies now advertising for ‘Software Engineer - Geospatial’ roles to build these features.
Breaking the silo
When you sell data, you are selling an ingredient. By developing software tools, a location data company can build a full solution and quickly give customers insights from the data. This can really be beneficial
for companies that do not have in-house geospatial data science resources. The downside of this approach is that you are now presenting a siloed view of the data. For more sophisticated users who already have a preferred data analysis environment, providing the data itself gives them more flexibility and the ability to glean deeper insights by combining with other data. This is where SafeGraph focuses its time and resources. We are entirely focused on data curation to empower data scientists with accurate and up to date information about physical places. Our customer use cases include site selection, marketing/ strategic planning, investment analysis, mapping, etc., as the industry continues to grow. For instance, recently, we have seen ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) budgets allocated towards location data to understand the carbon footprint of business operations.
BI companies are now leaning into geospatial data science, and are increasingly bringing in specialized talent to do so.
Data on-demand
Customers want accurate comprehensive coverage from one data provider. Typically, customers want a long-term license so they have the stability to build their own pipelines and products around the data. For one-off projects, we see customers wanting the flexibility of on-demand purchases. In the next five years, I expect data buyers will want deeper attributes about a given place as they build more complex machine learning models. Data accuracy and precision are equally important. Many people believe they are synonyms for each other but, in reality, they are two different characteristics that are critical for geospatial data to be effective in analytics. Accuracy refers to how close to truth a data point is, while precision refers to the ability to reproduce that measurement. SafeGraph’s Places dataset is foundational to our other datasets and is built to optimize both accuracy and precision. This means we diligently curate our point of interest (POI) data to be a true representation of the physical world, and the resulting accuracy and precision are carried over into our Geometry, Patterns, and Spend products. As a result, our customers are able to trust that places are where the data says they are, and are not generated in error. This gives them the confidence to use our POIs, polygons, foot traffic and transaction data related to a POI in their business decision-making.
