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Duke-Translational-Bioinformatics / covid19

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social distancing metrics based on cell-phone location data #4

Open nickeubank opened 4 years ago

nickeubank commented 4 years ago

Musing more, I find myself thinking more and more that getting a location-tracking advertising firm onboard would be the holy grail. They literally have locations, in near real-time, of a huge portion of americans down to a couple meter resolution (or better). Not only would it do everything we want, but they'd have older data (for baselining), and would have automatic national coverage (so this could be of general interest)

I assume they'll be reluctant to work with us given privacy/publicity concerns, but an outreach by someone with a lot of big words in their signature / from the Governers office may be worthwhile.

We'd want to emphasize (a) we don't want to identify individuals, just measure trends for different geographies for the purpose of model calibration / policy targeting, and (b) we don't actually need granular data if they're willing to compute some statistics in house.

If you aren't familiar with these groups, here's info on what they collect. Here are a few of these companies mentioned in those NYTimes stories:

GroundTruth
Fysical
Kiip
Placed / Foursquare

Current work:

danclarity commented 4 years ago

We've reached out to one company we work with that provides this information, but haven't heard back yet. They tend to be expensive, but hoping they can make something work for us.

nickeubank commented 4 years ago

@danclarity Thanks!

nickeubank commented 4 years ago

Note Unascore has released a very basic implementation of this idea you can find here. Looking forward to validating it against our phone survey data. I'll admit it's not the metric I would have used, but better than nothing...

nickeubank commented 4 years ago

Looks like CDC is now doing this: https://apple.news/AU1QlsMwHRleC7kmw3XwiWQ

danclarity commented 4 years ago

From folks in our community, I've heard of two places offering data for free to academics working on this: Facebook: https://dataforgood.fb.com/tools/disease-prevention-maps/ SafeGraph: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc501xfAzEPADOwRmsdHmu-v8aN14jnKHBmEmdJJcTgRLddqw/viewform

Just not 100% sure what's contained in these datasets!