Making Restaurant Inspections Smarter

Me

Senior DBA at Wake County

13 years

Code for Raleigh Brigade Captain

Business Analytics student @ Wake Tech

Lover of craft beer and Tracy – not in that order

ChrisTheDBA – Gmail, Github, Slack, Twitter

Chicago

https://www.foodbornechicago.org/

Chicago

http://chicago.github.io/food-inspections-evaluation/

Chicago

Establishments that had previous critical or serious violations

Three-day average high temperature

Nearby garbage and sanitation complaints

The type of facility being inspected

Nearby burglaries

Whether the establishment has a tobacco license or has an incidental alcohol consumption license

Length of time since last inspection

The length of time the establishment has been operating

Inspector assigned

Chicago

New York City

New York City

Wake County

Wake County LIVES data

Wake County

Yelp Reviews

Wake County

Wake County

The results are inconclusive that average restaurant ratings may indicate how well a restaurant performs during a food inspection administered by Wake County Environmental Services.

Additionally, we see that restaurants with a higher amount of foodborne illness flags (as derived from the text within a restaurant's reviews) tend to have lower average restaurant ratings.

The results of this project only suggest that restaurant ratings may be correlated with foodborne illness outbreaks. In order to further investigate a possible association between restaurant reviews and foodborne illness outbreaks, additional statistical and study design methods must be considered to improve the validity and robustness of this project.

Wake County – Next Steps

More Data

Additional review sources: Incorporate restaurant reviews from other sources in addition to yelp.

Additional Restaurants: Include more than 200 restaurants in order to have a bigger sample size.

Improve match rate between restaurant grade data and restaurant review data: Use restaurant name and address.

Storage Solution for data – Now using OpenDataSoft portal.

Wake County – Next Steps

Refine foodborne illness flag (FBI) classification: Perform a more thorough literature review to identify the best words to use for the FBI flag derivation.

Wake County – Next Steps

Apply additional statistical methods and machine learning techniques:

Apply t-test/ANOVA to identify whether the difference in average restaurant rating is statistically different between restaurant grade groups/fbi flag groups.

Explore the ability to prospectively predict foodborne illness outbreak or restaurant grade given previous restaurant review ratings.

Thanks