Leveraging Demand Data as a Proxy for Understanding Large-scale Events

Although, the internet opens an exceptional possibility for researchers conducting empirical studies on large-scale events by lowering the cost of collecting data and increasing the amount of information, there is a need to be cautious about not breaching the privacy of the users involved. Some types of internet data such as demand on networked systems (demand data) alleviate privacy concerns to some degree. To gauge the utility of demand data in understanding community behaviors during large scale events, we investigate its use in understanding quarantine compliance during Covid-19 pandemic. We analyse CDN demand data, google mobility data, and daily infection cases to see the pattern of correlation, and degree of influence of one variable on the others.