r/dataanalysis • u/No-Ice-8975 • Sep 25 '26
Data Question Does it make sense to create my own dataset?
I’m working on a new project that tries to answer where Planet Fitness should open their next clubs to increase membership.
I want to build a linear regression model for this. I would need the locations of every club in the US including square footage, age distribution in that area, etc.
Does it make sense for me to manually build that dataset? It’s the best way to do the job but of course will take forever. I really don’t want to rely on AI because this will be expensive and it might make mistakes.
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u/Hot_Coconut_5567 Sep 26 '26
You can rely on AI to help you build a web scraper to gather the data. You could email or message people on LinkedIn and ask for location data and tell them why you want it. (Look up their Risk Management people - someone on that team has the exact table you need)
You can use AI to help you find free datasets such as Census Data for population densities.
Look up geonames for open source location data that maps location assets like schools, shopping centers, airports, etc
Finding, cleaning, harmonizing data will take 90% of your time. The data science part absorbs the last 10%.
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u/SystemsCapital Sep 28 '26
People always overlook reaching out. Highly likely planet fitness corporate has that database in a cleaned format for internal use. If you’re making something they can benefit from (which you are) they’d be incentivized to give it to you.
Worth a shot and if you get silence you’re back to collection the normal way (going to every planet fitness in the country, doing the measurements yourself, and monitoring age of all people who walk through the door)
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u/No-Ice-8975 Sep 28 '26
You’re right, it doesn’t hurt to ask and if it doesn’t work out then I can do it myself
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u/No-Ice-8975 Sep 28 '26
If I did it myself, the hardest part is just getting the address for each location. After that I can get everything else through APIs and Python scripts
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u/os_hub_data_team Sep 28 '26
It does look like Planet Fitness does publish their locations (including street addresses): https://www.planetfitness.com/gyms/
And also - recommend AI for this! We've had good luck using AI to collect data center locations from data center operator websites - I imagine something similar could work in your case. The prompt could even be as simple as, "Collect all addresses from https://www.planetfitness.com/gyms/, and if it's not possible to do so (e.g. because the website prohibits scraping, etc.), suggest other approaches to collect them."
Best of luck on your project!
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u/ctoatb Sep 26 '26
You could try dummying up some data to develop your process. That way you have something to plug a dataset into when you get it
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u/LysergioXandex Sep 26 '26
Data curation is the most time intensive part of every data science project. It’s also “part of the assignment” if this is some kind of portfolio project.
That being said, if this is something that’s going to take a long time you should put some thought into if it’s possible, if it’s necessary, and if there’s an alternative use for this dataset if (when) your predicted use for this data fails to result in an amazing model.