LOGINOne of the interesting things you can do with access to anonymized, large scale and accurate cellphone location data, is to measure traffic patterns. Consistent with the Big Data theme, we decided to compute this across the whole US, to measure Total Miles Driven.
Total Miles Driven is estimated by the Federal Government (aka "FRED") in a monthly report, which is generated with about a 35 day delay (e.g., the September total miles driven is published in early November). The information is useful because it is an indicator of:
- Gas Demand
- Insurance Claims (all else being equal, the more people drive, the more accidents they will have, and the worse the insurance companies will perform, as the typically charge a fixed fee for insurance, independent of mileage)
There are two versions of Miles Driven published by FRED: seasonally adjusted, and unadjusted. We worked with the unadjusted, because it is really hard to replicate the seasonal adjustments (the government does not provide detailed steps of how they perform the adjustments).
The results are as close as it gets! The correlation between Advan's Miles Driven to the Federal Government's is 0.92. But Advan's data is available T+1 (i.e., with 1 day delay), so more than a full month ahead of FRED's. Talk about having an unfair trading advantage!
But we did not stop there. The beautiful thing about the breadth of the data available, is that we can also figure out which cellphone devices belong to truck drivers. Or for that matter, which devices live in a given Cebsus Block Group or Zipcode. Or which ones have a certain income level; or which ones buy or service their cars in a Ford dealer, or a Mercedes dealer; and so on. The miles driven can then be computed only for these devices, to generate custom insights that not even the government, or anyone else for that matter, has access to today, but will be unable to live without in the future!
Here are Advan's Trucks miles driven sourced from (the devices belonging to the drivers of) about half the commercial (class 8) trucks in the US:
The possibilities are endless, so free up your imagination and let us know what's the next interesting insight you want us to compute!
