Modeling with Demographic Dimensions

Retail performance models have long utilized trade area demographics to explain differences in store sales, and for good reason – the relationship between the demographic characteristics of a store trade area and its performance are both obvious and well understood....

The Dog Days of Summer

We’ve all heard the phrase “the dog days of summer”. But where did this phrase come from? We use the phrase to refer to those hot and humid days of mid-summer, but it originates from ancient Greek culture. It was related to the rising of the star system Sirius, which...

Cubit Planning

Over ten years ago, I was complaining to my friend, Anthony, how painful it was to pull Census demographic data for engineering projects. Anthony said that he could build a tool to automate this painful task. We partnered up and used seed funding from a local...

The Purpose of Analytics

Many years ago, the company I worked for produced a business/daytime population report for radius studies. We did not have a complete business list but rather used the County Business Patterns which provides unedited (dirty) data at the ZIP code level only (not...