Restaurant Health Inspection Score Prediction

What problem are we trying to solve?

Health inspectors currently pick restaurants to inspect randomly. Using ML, we can predict restaurants most at risk for failing a health inspection. Once these predictions have been made, Austin Department of Public Health staff can use these predictions to prioritize inspections.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

Austin Community will be more assured that the food they eat at any restaurant is safe. Restaurant owners will benefit because this system could also be used as a warning/forecasting system. City health inspectors will save time by focusing on only the most at risk restaurants, and can spend more time on other issues if neccesary.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

The City of Chicago did this. They were able to predict restaurants most at risk and then get to those restaurants faster. https://github.com/Chicago/food-inspections-evaluation

My team and I used the Chicago model as a basis for developing our own model for the city of Louisville during a hackathon https://github.com/PilgrimShadow/DerbyHacks17

What help is needed at this time?

Need developers who want to see this project through. Once I have a few people on board I will open a repository where we can start the selection of data to use in prediction.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Research what data Austin has that can be of use. In Chicago, they used Business Licenses,Food Inspections,Crime,Garbage Cart Complaints,Sanitation Complaints,Weather, and Sanitarian Information.

I was unable to implement all of these features but we decided to use 311 call data (available in Austin as well). However these are all excellent predictors in some form or fashion in my opinion. Perhaps Austin has data unique to the city that could be of help?

Project management

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open-austin / project-ideas