Predicting Restaurant Health Violations Using Yelp Reviews: A Machine Learning Approach
Abstract — The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) conducts at least one random inspection of every NYC restaurant per year, creating potential for missed opportunities to improve the health and hygiene of establishments with food safety issues and increased redundancy of inspecting clean restaurants that are following the guidelines satisfactorily. This project aims to identify restaurants who may be in violation of health and safety code using a classification model that learns restaurant inspection data and text data from Yelp consumer reviews.