Background Information

Yelp.com, is a crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site. The site has pages devoted to individual locations, such as restaurants or recreational facilities, where Yelp users can submit a review of their products or services using a one-to-five-star rating scale. Businesses can also update contact information, hours, and other basic listing information or add special deals. In addition to writing reviews, users can react to reviews, plan events, or discuss their personal lives.

As Yelp’s user base grew and its business data increased, it became a powerful tool for people to choose restaurants and entertainment venues. At the same time, by operating their own yelp pages, restaurants can also increase their popularity and potential user base.

Meanwhile, in people’s first impression, the restaurants around public spots and parks are often expensive and unpalatable. But some of the restaurants near parks can be high-end and fancy. Is this really the case? If so, how did these restaurants fail or success? How does high demand keep the bad eateries alive?

The project will attempt to analyze the reasons for a restaurant’s success based on yelp reviews, and analyze whether there is a connection between a high-scoring restaurant and the surrounding community environment. The project is divided into four parts:

• Mapping of parks and high stars restaurant in the city
• Restaurant quality prediction based on yelp reviews and spatial location
• Cluster analysis of Boston’s restaurants
• Restaurant quality prediction using random forest model.