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Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

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Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#81

Post by killjoywashere »

rented_mule wrote: post #64
ericrallen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation. At that point you need somethi…

An annoyance for me is that I've yet to see any address validator get my current home address right. They all insist my address is on the road that leads to my road rather than my actual road. It's understandable that they can't be 100% accurate given the scale / complexity of addresses. Most sites/apps will let me override the validator, but a few won't. The most common ones that insist on using the wrong address ar…

Same! My wife ran a business from home during the pandemic and we actually went through the effort to work with Google Maps (they called us) to get it on the map. And of course USPS has no problem. But our address was originally a federal building with a letter, still only has a letter, no number, and there are now all sorts of work-arounds floating around on how resolve addresses in our neighborhood. What's wild is the Post Office is literally down the street from our house, and our house predates the founding of most of the big delivery services, which all manage to deliver to us, given their preferred incantation. If I can't get the shipper to pass the right incantation to their shipping service, shenanigans ensue. My (least?) favorite was an item that went across the Pacific Ocean 3 times over the course of 3 months.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#82

Post by kjellsbells »

diggan wrote: post #33
jpjoi wrote: post #8

Zip codes are just weird to use for anything other than mail in general because they’re set up based off infrastructure. CGP Grey has a great video on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5oDtVAYzk

I've noticed more and more super/hypermarkets started asking for your zip/postal code sometime during self-checkout. I'm guessing they use these as approximations about where people travel from, so they can evaluate if to open more stores closer to popular areas, or something like that. Pretty sure there is more use cases for postal codes too.

Postcodes are very useful (but not perfect) proxies for household socioeconomic status, which is useful for marketing and sales analysis.

That data linked with the payment method that the register collects pretty much gives the store exactly who you are and where you live even if you chose not to sign up to the store's loyalty program.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#83

Post by ghaff »

ericrallen wrote: post #28
jonas21 wrote: post #14

ZIP codes are an emergent property of the mail delivery system. While the author might consider this a bad thing, this makes them "good enough" on multiple axes in practice. They tend to be: - Well-known (everybody knows their zip code) - Easily extracted (they're part of every address, no geocoding required) - Uniform-enough (not perfect, but in most cases close) - Granular-enough - Contiguous-enough by travel time…

This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation. At that point you need somethi…

Just last week I had to deal with the fact that my house has the wrong address in multiple databases because things changed when an interstate went in 40-something years ago. It's not a big change--main st. vs N main st. but it was enough to mess up various things. Not as much as when I moved in 30 years ago but still enough to be wrong in old town and telco records. Took me a couple of days to get a permit issued to get electrical hooked back up after a fire as a result because apparently some town clerk insisted the address wasn't valid.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#84

Post by steezeburger »

nitwit005 wrote: post #39
ericrallen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation. At that point you need somethi…

Yes, unfortunately, their assertion that everyone knows their zip code is wrong. People often write a neighboring code, and the post office just delivers it. Similar issues for city name, of course.

This sounds like the person doesn't know the receiver's zip code. Why are you extending that to not knowing their own zip code? Are they mailing something to themselves?

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#85

Post by throw0101c »

walrus01 wrote: post #43
jonas21 wrote: post #14

ZIP codes are an emergent property of the mail delivery system. While the author might consider this a bad thing, this makes them "good enough" on multiple axes in practice. They tend to be: - Well-known (everybody knows their zip code) - Easily extracted (they're part of every address, no geocoding required) - Uniform-enough (not perfect, but in most cases close) - Granular-enough - Contiguous-enough by travel time…

In terms of "good enough", a Canadian postal code, broadly equivalent to a zip code, is much more granular and can often identify an individual apartment building, or single city block. Plenty of large office buildings in major Canadian cities also have their own postal code. The functionality of it is closer to the "Zip+4" with extension used to have a more granular routing of physical mail for USPS. https://www.can…

> In terms of "good enough", a Canadian postal code, broadly equivalent to a zip code, is much more granular and can often identify an individual apartment building, or single city block.

To the point that StatCan and other agencies have rules on the number of characters that are collected/disseminated with other data to make sure it's not too identifying:

* https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...

* https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/ref/DQ-QD/guide_2-e...

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#86

Post by ajfriend »

kylebarron wrote: post #62
hammock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the benefit of H3 vs a rectangular grid?

Equal distances to each adjacent neighbor: https://www.uber.com/blog/h3/

They also only have one type of neighbor. Square grids have 2 neighbor types. Triangular grids have 3.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#87

Post by toast0 »

steezeburger wrote: post #84
nitwit005 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, unfortunately, their assertion that everyone knows their zip code is wrong. People often write a neighboring code, and the post office just delivers it. Similar issues for city name, of course.

This sounds like the person doesn't know the receiver's zip code. Why are you extending that to not knowing their own zip code? Are they mailing something to themselves?

People often give out their mailing address, and may be misinformed about their zip code.

If you get close enough, it usually gets handled in the local sort, but not always.

On cities, the mailing address city really is the name of the post office that handles your delivery route. Often there's a relationship with the city you live in, but there's cases both ways --- I used to live outside city limits, we had a census designated place name, a municipal sanitary district and had a fire department at one time... but never a post office, so our mailing address used the nearby city name, where our post office resided. The place name had an incorporated city on the other side of the state, so using that wouldn't be great.

Nowadays, post offices often have a list of alternative place names, so where I live now, I can pick between the incorporated city name, the nearby large city where a post office that processes all my mail is located, or any of the numerous small post offices that once served my city.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#89

Post by ajfriend »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #24
ajfriend wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on if you want to model a point or an area. lat/lng gives you a point , but you often want an area to, for example, count how many people are in that area. A spatial index like H3 provides a grid of area units.

But so do lat long ranges.

You can use those if they work for your application. One downside would be that you're storing 4 numbers compared to a single `int64` index with H3.

You also have to decide how you'll do that binning. Can bins overlap? What do you do at the poles? H3 provides some reasonable default choices for you so don't have to worry about that part of your solution design.

Re: Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)

#90

Post by ajfriend »

ingenieroariel wrote: post #26
ajfriend wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care about that and have a data source, you can add, for example, population density per H3 cell as part of your analysis. That has the additional benefit of denoting the this quantity of interest explicitly , rather than some implicitly assumed correlation which may not be true.

Hey AJ, this is almost on topic, do you know of a more up to date version of the dataset you used on the blog post release for H3 v4.0.0 [1]? They stopped updating in Oct 2023. Thanks! [1] https://data.humdata.org/dataset/kontur-population-dataset

I don't. And maybe I should have emphasized "and have a data source" more, since its doing a lot of the heavy-lifting in my statement :)
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