By Neal Ungerleider
Route Fifty
Chicago is one of America’s biggest restaurant cities. Destination restaurants such as Alinea and Frontera Grill draw customers from around the world, and the city limits are home to more than 15,000 restaurants, grocery stores and other dining establishments. The city’s Department of Public Health is now turning to a new tool to make sure those dining establishments don’t make diners sick: Predictive analytics using massive open data sets.
Under the new initiative, Chicago will determine which restaurants are priorities for inspections using a predictive model and data sets which are posted on open source site GitHub.
Restaurants whose data points show anomalies when analyzed will be slated for priority inspection; the city of Chicago hopes that making their data and models available on GitHub will allow them to both leverage talent outside their organization to improve the lives of city residents—and to have other cities look to Chicago as a trailblazer.
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