On a big screen inside Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory (Shanghai) located in the Think Tank Building of Fudan University, data and charts are constantly being updated.
▲The screen displaying consumption data in the Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory (Shanghai)
You may have no idea of what these information is, but you may have heard of an overwhelming number of news reports on the city’s consumption statistics for the recent National Day holiday like this: “...the sum of online and offline consumption (during the National Day holiday) in Shanghai reached 76.588 billion yuan, up 16% year on year...”
The statistics in these news actually come from the data analysis by Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory (Shanghai). As the first laboratory for consumer market big data in China, the Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory (Shanghai) was initiated in September 2020, authorized by the Ministry of Commerce, Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce and Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics. A university-level sub-center of the Lab was set up in Fudan, namely Fudan University Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory, which is now managed by Fudan Development Institute.
▲Shanghai Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory is directed by Fudan Development Institute
Compared with traditional monitoring models which collects statistics on a monthly basis, big data monitoring collects statistics on a daily or an hourly basis with a faster response speed. Besides, big data monitoring can deal with a much wider range of samples from almost every corner of a consumer market, thus making consumer profiling, market segmentation and brand grouping possible, as well as obtaining regional consumption trends and online and offline consumption preferences, while traditional models can only tell the total amount of consumption in the market.
Meanwhile, many state-owned enterprises and payment agencies have become the Lab’s data sources. Over the past year, the Lab has provided statistics and advice based on its research for policy makers.
At present, the Lab has achieved “T+1” tracking through massive amounts of data collected from various personal payment terminals. With computation of multi-source data and multi-payment methods (bank cards and third-party online payment services), the Lab is able to monitor online/offline and overseas/domestic consumption efficiently. It has become a pioneer in digital economy in China, popularizing the use of big data in the consumer market and buttressing the local government’s decision making for promoting consumption upgrade.
▲ Consumption hot spots monitored by the Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory (Shanghai)
Based on statistics from a variety of sources, a comprehensive analysis report would be generated in this Lab following procedures including data cleaning, desensitization, classification, modeling, processing, etc.
“A very important task of ours is data cleaning. We need to do lots of debugging and labeling work before modeling and analysis”, said Zhang Yina, director of Consumer Market Big Data Lab of Fudan University and professor of School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University.
Multidisciplinary collaboration is another contributor to the Lab’s smooth and effective operation. “The Lab grows against the backdrop of disciplinary integration of humanities, social sciences, science and technology and medicine in Fudan. What our research deals with are not simple social science problems, so we need multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Zhang.
With more and more diversified forms of consumption in people’s daily life, the Lab is trying to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior through big-data analysis in the future, hoping to discover patterns in consumer market trends and promote sustainable development of consumer market.
