IS-608: Data Visualization Final Project, Spring 2016

Manhattan Restaurant Inspection Data and Visualization

This project was done for CUNY IS608.

1. Background

New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) conducts unannounced inspections of restaurants at least once a year. Inspectors check for compliance in food handling, food temperature, personal hygiene and vermin control. Each violation of a regulation gets a certain number of points. At the end of the inspection, the inspector totals the points, and this number is the restaurant's inspection score—the lower the score, the better the Grade. Restaurants with a score between 0 and 13 points earn an A, those with 14 to 27 points receive a B and those with 28 or more a C. Please note that not every restaurant receives one of these letter grades; inspectors can give other scores, primarily P or Z, or some version of “grade pending.”

The Health Department inspects about 24,000 restaurants a year to monitor compliance with City and State food safety regulations. Since July 2010, the Health Department has required restaurants to post letter grades showing sanitary inspection results.


2. Purpose

This project is intended to inform customers about the NYC’s restaurants’ sanitation inspection results. It will help customers decide where to eat based on restaurants ‘sanitation inspection grade and violation severity.


3. Description

The objective of the project is to analyze the restaurant inspection data from NYC Open Data. The main focus will be on the Borough of Manhattan and the analysis will be based on results from years 2010 - 2016.

The project application will interactively help customers select restaurants based on sanitation inspection grade and type of cuisine. For instance, before making a dinner reservation, a customer may want to find all Tai cuisine restaurants with lower score; hence better grade.

4. Implementation

The project implementation will adhere to the below high level best practice phases as follow:

4.1 Data Acquisition
  • The data will be sourced from NYC OpenData site provided by DOHMH New York City Restaurant Inspection.
  • The dataset provides restaurant inspections, violations, grades and adjudication information.
  • The dataset has NYC’s five boroughs. The data has been collected since 2010.
  • The total data size for all NYC boroughs is over 150MB. However, due to size limitation, we will focus only on the borough of Manhattan.
  • Please note that establishments with inspection date of 1/1/1900 are new establishments that have not yet received a full inspection.
    •
    4.2 Data Cleansing

    The data cleaning process will include handling outliers, null values, inappropriate negative values, and conforming to the English language type set. The tools used to clean the data will be mainly R language. The data cleaning process will be done separately from the data presentation.

    4.3 Data Presentation

    The data analysis will be presented via html, javascript, using Google chart. The visualization will be using over time based trends, map based analysis, as well as interactive and chart filtering analysis. The visualization will comprise of eight charts.

    Chart 1 shows the 2016 critical violation scores count. It only shows only restaurants with 27 score or higher. Restaurants with score 27 or higher receive bad grade of C.

    Chart 2 shows the 2016 restaurants with the worst grade. Please note a high score of a grade of Z or P pertains to those restaurants with pending grade.


    The below map shows the worst scored (scores greater than 27) restaurants in Manhattan in 2016

    The below pin colored map shows the locations of 50 Best and 50 worst Restaurants in Manhattan. Green pins shows best and red pins show worst graded restaurants in 2016

    Five coffee shops filtered by the average score over five years.

    Five coffee shops yearly average filtered by year over five years

    Coffee shops scores over the years compared to the yearly average




    The below selection chart and table show restaurants 2016 scores filtered using Neighborhood and Cuisine type.

    Pease choose a neighborhood
    Pease choose a cuisine type



    Restaurants Scores by Neighborhood and Cuisine Type (2016)




















    Restaurants Scores by Neighborhood and Cuisine Type (2016)
    5. Conclusion

    The Health Department conducts unannounced inspections of restaurants at least once a year. Inspectors check for compliance in food handling, food temperature, personal hygiene and vermin control. Each violation of a regulation gets a certain number of points. At the end of the inspection, the inspector totals the points, and this number is the restaurant's inspection score—the lower the score, the better the Grade.

    From the analysis we can infer that restaurants that are part of chain or franchise tend to score better and have better grades. Coffee shops also score better. However, they tend to fluctuate in scores perhaps as they mature in handling other foods in addition to beverages, such as sandwiches and salads.
    In addition, neither restaurants geographical locations nor cuisine types have any impact on the score although it seems little higher in uptown and downtown. However, location is not a strong indicator of sanitation score differentiator.