If I Build It, Will They Come? Predicting New Venue Visitation Patterns Through Mobility Data

Estimating revenue and business demand of a newly opened venue is paramount as these early stages often involve critical decisions such as first rounds of staffing and resource allocation. Traditionally, this estimation has been performed through coarse measures such as observing numbers in local venues. The advent of crowdsourced data from devices and services has opened the door to better predictions of temporal visitation patterns for locations and venues. In this paper, using mobility data from the location-based service Foursquare, we treat venue categories as proxies for urban activities and analyze how they become popular over time. The main contribution of this work is a prediction framework able to use characteristic temporal signatures of places together with k-nearest neighbor metrics capturing similarities among urban regions to forecast weekly popularity dynamics of a new venue establishment. Our evaluation shows that temporally similar areas of a city can be valuable predictors, decreasing error by 41%. Our findings have the potential to impact the design of location-based technologies and decisions made by new business owners.