Data Science Project: Visualizing Yelp's Dataset

Rationale

Explore and communicate insights from Yelp's businesses and tips dataset for Las Vegas, via an interactive web visualizations dashboard.

Dataset

• Yelp's Open Dataset
• Documentation
  • business.json: Contains business data including location data, attributes, and categories.
  • tips.json: Tips written by a user on a business. Tips are shorter than reviews and tend to convey quick suggestions.
  • checkin.json: Checkins on a business.

Tools/Technologies Used

• Python-Flask powered RESTFUL API
• MongoDB
• HTML, CSS, JS, Bootstrap
• D3.js
• AnyChart.js
• Plotly.js
• Python/Pandas and Excel to call the data, understand it, cleanse/manipulate it and create task specific JSONs

Instructions to Run the Web App & Server

1. Download the original Yelp JSON Dataset files from here. For this application you will only need the three data files below.

   • yelp_academic_dataset_business.json
   • yelp_academic_dataset_checkin.json
   • yelp_academic_dataset_tip.json

2. Download/Clone this repo to your local machine.

3. On your local machine, move the three Yelp JSON files above to the static/assets/data folder within your repo. Unzip the file yelp_las_vegas_checkin_business_dataset_records.json.zip located in the same folder.

4. Run all the cells in the Jupyter Notebook yelp_dataset_cleanup.json (for EDA purposes and to extract/convert data that we want to plot and analyze).

5. Make sure you have MongoDB installed on your machine, preferably with the MongoDB Compass GUI.

6. Run python load_yelp_dataset.py. This will load the relevant Yelp JSON datasets to MongoDB. The script automatically creates the necessary collections and inserts the JSON documents to each collection.

   • Note: You may need to "pip install" the packages: json, os and pymongo.

7. Start the Flask server by running python yelp_app.py.

   • Note: You may need to "pip install" the packages - bson, flask, flask_pymongo and flask_Cors.

   * Serving Flask app "yelp_app" (lazy loading)
   * Environment: production
     WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment.
     Use a production WSGI server instead.
   * Debug mode: on
   * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
   * Restarting with stat
   * Debugger is active!
   * Debugger PIN: 257-766-732
   

8. Launch the app in the browser by going to: http://localhost:5500/yelp-visualizations/templates/index.html. You should see an interactive Yelp Dashboard for Las Vegas as shown below, with options to select various charts.