PredictHQ, the demand intelligence company, announced the launch of the PredictHQ Event Index, an easy-to-understand, week-by-week indication of how much events will impact key cities. It uses a series of machine learning models to identify the impact of weekly event activity in more than 60 cities and compares that to five years of historical event impact to generate a score out of 20. This gives companies operating in those areas a simple summary to help them plan for any anticipated demand surges or drops.
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An index score of 10 represents an average score for that city, a score above a 15 means the city is likely to be significantly busier than usual, and a score below an 8 means that city will likely be noticeably quieter than usual. Every city has its own baseline and scale to accommodate for the variation in their populations. For example, a score of an 18 in New York City will entail millions of people moving about the city, whereas a score of 18 in Wichita, Kansas will involve just over 100,000 people.
“We’ve spent years aggregating and analyzing billions of event data points to understand how these external forces impact demand for businesses across a range of industries, so we’re acutely aware of how significant these impacts can be,” said Campbell Brown, CEO of PredictHQ. “One cluster of events could drive six figures in sales in a single weekend for a restaurant in that city, but only if that business is ready for the surge. Knowing small businesses and city leaders often don’t have resources for sophisticated demand forecasting, we built the Event Index to provide a simple metric for tracking upcoming demand surges and drops so they can plan with confidence.”
The Index scores for the month ahead highlight just how much events impact people movement across the country – especially in cities that aren’t known as event hot spots. For example, San Antonio has an Index score of 16.3 for the first week of May, suggesting local businesses should prepare for demand surges, but that score drops to just 7.6 the following week, meaning businesses should plan for a drop in demand during that time.
PredictHQ tracks global events across19 categories, accounting for attendance-based events like concerts, non-attendance-based events like public holidays, unscheduled events such as severe weather incidents, and viewership for televised sporting events. The Event Index factors in the vast majority of these events, with the exclusion of breaking events that are captured in real-time and televised events, to give a quick look at the aggregate impact of everything taking place in a given city during that week. It provides a weekly score for the month ahead as well as the two months prior, so companies can track scores over time and get a better understanding of what each score means for their business.