Characterizing geographic areas based on geolocations reported by populations of mobile computing devices

A non-transitory, machine-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, effectuate operations comprising:

• obtaining, with a computer system, a set of geographic places of interest;
• obtaining, with the computer system, a set of location identifiers of mobile computing devices, the set of location identifiers of the mobile computing devices being based on a set of wireless signals transmitted or received by a set of mobile computing devices;
• determining, with the computer system, a set of geographic unit tiles based on the set of geographic places of interest;
• determining, with the computer system, a subset of the set of location identifiers of mobile computing devices based on members of the subset of the set of location identifiers having a respective location associated with a respective location identifier within one of the places of interest;
• determining, with the computer system, a subset of the mobile computing devices based on the subset of the set of location identifiers of mobile computing devices, wherein each of the subset of the mobile computing devices is associated with one location identifier in the subset of the set of location identifiers of mobile computing devices;
• determining, with the computer system, a set of dwell-based values based on the subset of the set of mobile computing devices, wherein the set of dwell-based values is based on an amount of mobile computing devices from the subset of the set of mobile computing devices indicated to have visited one of the set of geographic unit tiles outside a boundary of a set of locations associated with the set of location identifiers;
• determining, with the computer system, a set of threshold-satisfying geographic unit tiles based on the set of dwell-based values and a threshold, wherein the set of threshold-satisfying geographic unit tiles satisfies the threshold;
• and
• storing the set of threshold-satisfying geographic unit tiles in the computer system.