Demand driven store site selection via multiple spatial-temporal data

Choosing a good location when opening a new store is crucial for the future success of a business. Traditional methods include offline manual survey, analytic models based on census data, which are either unable to adapt to the dynamic market or very time consuming. The rapid increase of the availability of big data from various types of mobile devices, such as online query data and offline positioning data, provides us with the possibility to develop automatic and accurate data- driven prediction models for business store site selection. In this paper, we propose a Demand Driven Store Site Selection (DD3S) framework for business store site selection by mining search query data from Baidu Maps. DD3S first detects the spatial-temporal distributions of customer demands on different business services via query data from Baidu Maps, the largest online map search engine in China, and detects the gaps between demand and supply. Then we determine candidate locations via clustering such gaps. In the final stage, we solve the location optimization problem by predicting and ranking the number of customers. We not only deploy supervised regression models to predict the number of customers, but also use learning-to-rank model to directly rank the locations. We evaluate our framework on various types of businesses in real-world cases, and the experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. DD3S as the core function for store site selection has already been implemented as a core component of our business analytics platform and could be potentially used by chain store merchants on Baidu Nuomi.