Traits

Traits overview

Traits are interesting features about individuals and/or their households, sourced from both your data and Faraday's. The Faraday Identity Graph (FIG) includes 1,500+ rich attributes of data on 270 million adult consumers, with built-in identity resolution. Faraday's data is licensed, permissioned, and responsibly-sourced from reputable data brokers, and includes data from public record, surveys, self-reporting, and non-cash transactions.

Traits are primarily used in cohorts and persona sets. In cohorts, they can be used to help define and add nuance to groups of people that your business is interested in, and in persona sets, they're how your persona predictions are made–by grouping the individuals in your cohorts by the highest coverage traits among them. Additionally, you'll find traits when using score explainability in your outcomes.

A full list of traits in Faraday is available via the Dashboard UI, and traits can be listed, created, deleted, and more via our API. This includes both traits from Faraday, and those that you have created within your account.

Property traits

Property traits in FIG are sourced from data brokers that specialize in the collection of property data, such as tax assessor offices. Due to this, coverage for any given trait tends to follow a geographic pattern, based on the data collection requirements for a given county or municipal tax assessor office. For example, some tax assessor offices might collect heating system type, while others do not–these are represented as null values, and should be interpreted as "unknown." In Faraday, an example of this would be, if the trait heating system type is not populated, it means Faraday does not know the heating system type as opposed to the property not having any heating system at all.

Consumer traits

Consumer traits in FIG are similarly sourced from data brokers that specialize in collection of demographic, lifestyle, and financial information. The source of these traits is wide-ranging, but includes data from self-reporting, surveys, public record, and inferred traits from non-cash transaction data. Null values should be interpreted as unknown–for example, an individual with the dog owner trait not populated would mean that Faraday does not know if they have a dog as opposed to them not having a dog.

Trait accuracy

With a dataset of the size of FIG, trait inaccuracies are possible. Sources of error include–but are not limited to– data currency, misreporting by individuals, and the application of household values to individuals. As a means to combat inaccuracies, Faraday sources data from a variety of vendors to improve data quality through multi-vendor corroboration.

Trait currency

Faraday receives updated data from our data partners on varying schedules, but FIG is generally updated on a quarterly basis. It should be noted that this does not mean that every record within FIG is updated with each installment.

Specific trait guides

Below, you'll find additional descriptions or tables, where applicable, for some Faraday Identity Graph traits.

Housing density definitions

The housing_density trait corresponds to “Units per sq/mi” below.

Housing density definitions

Rank	Name	Units per sq/mi
0	Unpopulated	0
1	Sparsely populated	1-72
2	Lightly rural	72-337
3	Moderately rural	337-640
4	Low density suburban	640-1,200
5	Medium density suburban	1,200-2,400
6	High density suburban	2,400-3,456
7	Low density urban	3,456-4,672
8	Medium density urban	4,762-6,400
9	High density urban	6,400-10,000
10	Moderate urban core	10,000-16,000
11	Dense urban core	16,000+