Repository logo
 

The Role of Urban Mobility in Retail Business Survival

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Jayarajah, Kasthuri 
Noulas, Anastasios 
Misra, Archan 

Abstract

jats:pEconomic and urban planning agencies have strong interest in tackling the hard problem of predicting the odds of survival of individual retail businesses. In this work, we tap urban mobility data available both from a location-based intelligence platform, Foursquare, and from public transportation agencies, and investigate whether mobility-derived features can help foretell the failure of such retail businesses, over a 6 month horizon, across 10 distinct cities spanning the globe. We hypothesise that the survival of such a retail outlet is correlated with not only venue-specific characteristics but also broader neighbourhood-level effects. Through careful statistical analysis of Foursquare and taxi mobility data, we uncover a set of discriminative features, belonging to the neighbourhood's static characteristics, the venue-specific customer visit dynamics, and the neighbourhood's mobility dynamics. We demonstrate that classifiers trained on such features can predict such survival with high accuracy, achieving approximately 80% precision and recall across the cities. We also show that the impact of such features varies across new and established venues and across different cities. Besides achieving a significant improvement over past work on business vitality prediction, our work demonstrates the vital role that mobility dynamics plays in the economic evolution of a city.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

Information systems, Spatial-temporal systems, Data mining, Human-centered computing, Urban computing, Spatio-temporal patterns, Predictive modeling, Location-based services

Journal Title

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Conference Name

Ubicomp 2018

Journal ISSN

2474-9567
2474-9567

Volume Title

2

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Sponsorship
EPSRC Grant Number EP/N510129/1