This project is part of the Coursera Applied Data Science Course, which is part of the IBM Data Science Professional Certification.

1. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC
By Jiro Stenger
Capstone Project
The Battle of Neighborhoods
Part of the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate
Jan 2020

2. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Introduction
• The following capstone project is part of the Coursera Applied Data Science Course, which is part of the IBM Data
Science Professional Certification.
• GitHub Repository:
https://github.com/jirostenger/Coursera_Capstone/blob/edae726cae77657a1627516ba484567dc71eba78/Battl
e%20of%20Neighborhoods%20Project%20Part%202.ipynb
• The idea is to think of a fictitious business problem of a client and to solve it using data & FourSquare API
• The goal of the following project is to find out the best locations for a Japanese restaurant in New York City
Jan 2020

3. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Business Problem
Jan 2020
• A client wants to open a major Japanese restaurant in NYC
• The client is aware there is lots of competition in a city like NYC
• The investment, that is needed to open the restaurant is very high, so the client needs recommendation on the
location to choose for the venue
• He needs to know where the Japanese restaurants are located and what they serve
• After a little research, I found there is a neighborhood called "little Tokyo". It is supposed to be located in the
East Village between St. Mark's Place and 10th Street (Source: Beacon Hotel, 2018)
• I will attempt to prove, if there is actually a neighborhood in NYC with a high quantity of Japanese restaurants as
well as whether the location stated before is correct or not

4. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Data
• I need data on boroughs and neighborhoods of New York City
• I need data of restaurants and their location with latitute and longitute as well as their menus
• i will get the data on neighborhoods, boroughs, latitudes and longitudes from the following
GeoJSON: https://cocl.us/new_york_dataset
• The data on neighborhood boundaries of NYC I will obtain from here: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-
Government/Borough-Boundaries/tqmj-j8zm
• Lastly, I will get the data on Japanese restaurants and the type of food they serve as well as their geo coordinates
via the FourSquare API and request library
Jan 2020

5. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
1. Collect the described data from the section Data
2. Clean and process it into a dataframe
3. Use FourSquare data to locate all the restaurants and filter down to the Japanese ones
4. Take a look at the neighborhoods and boroughs of NYC and locate the Japanese restaurants in the areas
5. Using matplotlib and folium, I will visualize our data to get a better understanding
6. Get the menus of the restaurants by FourSquare and add them to the dataframe
7. In the end I will use the data of the restaurants menu to cluster the restaurants using K-means.
Jan 2020

6. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• I imported some libraries
and defined functions
• They can be found in the
GitHub Repo

7. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• I got the NYC data & the result was a total of 306 neighborhoods
• Then I visualized the distribution of the neighborhoods per borough

8. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• I also got the location data of the
venues from the FourSquare API
combined with the neighborhood
and borough data from the
first data set
• See next slide for dataframe

9. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• List of the venues & location data from FourSquare
• 75 venues returned, but no restaurant in Bronx

10. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• Unlike expected, East Village aka little Tokyo is not among the top 5 neighborhoods

11. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• Japanese restaurant “Kyo Ya“ is actually
on 10th Street in East Village
• But it‘s the only one…

12. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Methodology
Jan 2020
• Unfortunately it is not possible to get
menu data with a regular FS account
• It only returns an empty dataframe
• This is why I had to abort the attempt
to get menu data for clustering

13. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Results
Jan 2020
Even though the project had to be aborted because of the missing permission of a regular Foursquare account, I
was able to achieve the following results throughout the project:
• The borough Manhatten consists of the least neighborhoods, but has the most Japanese restaurants
• There is no Japanese restaurant in the borough Bronx. This could be an interesting starting point for further
evaluation
• In East Village aka little Tokyo we expected to find the most Japanese restaurants. Surprisingly, there is only one
restaurant yet. There must be another reason for the neighborhood to be called little Tokyo then having
Japanese restaurants. Since there is only one restaurant yet, it could be an interesting area to propose to the
client

14. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Discussion
Jan 2020
• Looking at the elaborated neighborhoods, there is a good chance that East Village could be an interesting
neighborhood for the client to open the major Japanese restaurant
• Like mentioned before though, a lot more research needs to be done to deliver a valuable recommendation for
the client
• Also a lot of other variables like demographic characteristics could be evaluated in a further study, but since this
project is fictitious, I will stop right here.

15. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Conclusion
Jan 2020
• The project has been a good way to apply theorethical knowledge learned from the last courses of the Applied
Data Science Specialization
• Unfortunately FourSquare changed it's policy, so the access to valuable venue data was very limited
• Hence, the course could be updated, so participants do not rely on FourSquare data in future studies

16. Japanese
Restaurants in NYC By Jiro Stenger
Sources
Jan 2020
• Nippon.com, 2016: https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00128/japanese-restaurants-on-the-rise-abroad.html
• Investopedia, 2019: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/012315/how-expensive-new-york-city-
really.asp
• Beacon Hotel, 2018: https://www.beaconhotel.com/blog/your-intro-to-all-things-japanese-in-nyc/