Is this business steady, yellow-flag or red-flag? One number plus one reference tells you

What this is

One of our published methods, written in plain language: what it can do, when to use it, what goes in and what comes out.

Why it matters

Most methods are published as papers or code. This one is written so you can decide whether it fits your problem before you invest time in it.

How to use it

Read the page top to bottom. If it matches your question, use the online tool - or subscribe and run it on your own data.

What you get

A clear answer on what the method does and does not do, plus a live curve from our own demand series. Free to read.

Free to readOnline tools from $5 per runSee it →

Demand curve read by this method — A live reading from our own demand series - the shape of the signal this method works on. 570 industries are tracked daily; this is one of them.

Data base: InfoGap own records - 391 Chinese cities x 8 dimensions, 213,208 city-industry rows, 40,499 POIs (central / lifechain, 2026-10-08).

InfoGap Algorithm Handbook · one algorithm per page, plain language · formal name: risk grading

1In one line: what it does

Give it a number and give it a reference, and it tells you on the spot whether you are steady, yellow-flag or red-flag — and says straight out what to do.

2When you would use it

Three situations where it helps:

You write down one number for your shop every week (say, how many people came in to ask about prices), you have a few weeks of it, but nobody tells you whether this week counts as normal or not.

What people usually do: go by feel — it looks fine, so carry on.

Using it: put this week's number in and put the reference number it should sit against in, and it gives you a colour plus a one-line action.

You have a city × industry table and you want to know which cells are getting better and which are getting worse.

What people usually do: read straight down a row of numbers and still cannot say who is high and who is low.

Using it: go row by row; every row gets a colour, and the worsening ones move themselves to the top.

Someone reports a number to you and says "this is dangerous", and you have no way to judge whether that is true.

What people usually do: take their word for it.

Using it: put the reference number in alongside it and let the rule speak; how far off it is, and whether the direction is improving or worsening, are both laid out plainly.

3What goes in · what comes out

Input (the set below is the one from the real run)

· Current value: 150
· Reference value it should sit against: 120.22 (the average across other cities in the same industry)
· Direction: improving (that means moving up)
· Name of this number: Chongqing gym gap score

What comes out

These numbers are what it produced on the spot, with not a character changed:

24.8% above the reference
Direction: improving ↑
Verdict: 🟢 Steady
What to do: hold as you are, monitor as usual

—— same rules, a different set of numbers (current value changed to 40, direction changed to worsening) ——
66.7% below the reference
Verdict: 🔴 High risk
What to do: act immediately, urgent intervention

How to read it: look at the colour first, then at the "what to do" line. Green does not mean "nothing is wrong" — it means "keep doing what you are doing, don't stop". Red is the one that means move now. Note the middle step: with the same reference, changing the current value and the direction flips the colour from green to red, which shows it is really computing rather than printing fixed copy.

📈One chart: over these 35 days, what lights the industries showed

Counted per day, of the industries being watched, how many were on green and how many were flashing yellow or red.

4How to use it

There is no public calculator for this yet — the method above is the whole procedure; on this site the inputs have to be keyed in by hand.

Take the row you want to look at from the city × industry gap table
In the "risk" column, compare that row's number against the reference it should sit against
Read off the colour and the one-line action

5Who it is for

Shop owners who record one number every week; people who need to see which of several cities or industries is deteriorating; people who have the data but cannot pin down a "normal range".

6Common questions

Q: Where does the reference number come from?

A: In the worked example above it is already filled in — it is the average across other cities in the same industry. When you do it yourself, you can also use "your own average over the past 8 weeks" as the reference.

Q: Is it only green and yellow?

A: There are four levels in total: green steady, yellow watch, orange warning, red high risk. Red always comes with an action like "act immediately".

Q: Can one number decide whether something is dangerous?

A: No. It only judges how far the number sits from the reference and which way it is moving; it does not care what the number itself is. So pick the wrong reference and the verdict is wrong.

7Related algorithms

value-assessment · is it worth doing industry-vitality · is this line still alive curve-generation · three readings become a line ← Back to the Algorithm Handbook Handbook index

✓Why this scenario exists (where the content comes from)

This scenario comes from the record left by the "algorithms hitting demand" round: the Chongqing · gym demand was put up against 5 algorithms, and the risk grading one was judged "useful", the reason in the original wording being "deviation rate × trend direction → four levels. Trend +0.5 → improving/stable; -0.5 → worsening/high risk. The ledger already held the value and the direction".

The input and output above come from re-running the exact set of numbers in that record: Chongqing gym gap score 150, reference 120.22 (the score on row 44 of the gap table), direction improving.

Source: row 44 of the in-house city × industry gap table (Chongqing, gym, score=112.66, direction=up); the paired match ledger (schema hit.v2), group D4.