M.S. Applied Data Science - Capstone Chronicles 2025

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provided to help identify these locations and provide additional context. Ultimately, this allows a business to capture a better understanding of their business community through latent behavior detection derived from cross-shopping patterns.

Figure 8 Mile Community and Cross Shopping Detection for Philz Coffee in Encinitas

Discussion The investigation of San Diego cross-shopping networks revealed two structural

observations: the presence of large-scale “hub” retailers including Walmart, McDonalds, Target, Shell Oil, and Costco as well as the necessity of geographic filtering for community detection. Consistent with Rossi et al. (2022), the usage of directional, weighted edges in our graph model proved invaluable to distinguish between brands that “send” traffic versus those that “receive” it.

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