New feature: Closed-Door Sports Events Now Searchable in PredictHQ API

Published on May 27, 2020
Peter Jansen
Head of Product

Sports are major drivers of demand and they are among the first events to return from the lockdown except with a significant change – many will be taking place without spectators or “behind closed doors”. This will change the impact sports games have on demand and will be a welcome boon for businesses in the food retail, delivery and CPG verticals – if they prepare well.

For example, the following major sports events will be taking place with little to no spectators allowed, shifting demand impact from a major impact on physical locations to a much more displaced impact:

Removing the onsite spectators from a sports event will impact other businesses also. For example, while retail stores, transport and food outlets near venues will not receive the surge in demand they usually would for a key sports game that attracted thousands of spectators. Companies that include sports games in their demand forecasting modeling need to ensure they have a way to identify which events are behind-closed-doors and which events are attended.

“It enables data scientists to know the combined impact of all the events taking place in a location and time as a value, so it can be used in demand forecasting models.”

PredictHQ has many customers in the food retail, retail and transport verticals, so we have created a new label for the thousands of sports events in our system. This closed-doors label enables teams and models to know instantly when an event will have attendees compared to displaced demand only.

How to use our new closed-doors feature v1

Data scientists and engineers can use this feature in our API and via our Data Exporter while others can access it through our Control Center search functionality.

Control Center

To find these events in Control Center, simply open up the search tab and:

  1. Enter the term closed-doors into labels to search, and then tick the ‘lockdown’ label.

  2. Select the time period, location and any other parameters you want to search on

This will cause Control Center Search to display the relevant events that are taking place behind-closed-doors.

alt

How to access these events with our API

As in Control Center, you call the API and filter using the closed-doors label. Then specify the location you want to see the closed-door sports events for (as well as any other filters you wish to use). The example below retrieves all closed-doors events that you have access to.

curl -X GET  https://api.predicthq.com/v1/events/?label=closed-doors \ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN"

If you wish to implement special handling for closed-doors events in your models or integration then look for the closed-doors label in events. PHQ Rank reflects the attendance of an event. Closed-doors events have very low attendance with only the teams and support staff so they will tend to have low rank.

We’ve provided the closed-doors label as a way to retrieve these events if you wish to track them or if the television viewership or other impact it has on your business.