1

Complaints and crowdsourcing

Most restaurant inspections are “routine inspections,” but some originate from a complaint by customers to the Detroit Health Department. Investigate whether these complaints are useful in identifying potential violations. In particular, do inspections triggered by complaints lead to more citations and/or more severe citations? Alternatively, when customers notice some food safety concern, they may complain on social media to directly warn future customers about the issue. Investigate whether social media posts and reviews (e.g., Google, Yelp, Twitter) could help inspectors identify restaurants violating the health code. See this paper or that paper for examples.

2

Predictors

Identify predictors of violations such as, but not limited to, location (neighborhood, street), time (seasonality, trend over years), establishment type (restaurant/school, delivery only, food truck), food served, complexity level, inspections (time since last, past violations), whether it is a chain and which chain it is. For information identified to be predictive, explore how it is associated with violations. Furthermore, explore what these features may indicate about bias or fairness in inspections. 

3

Inspector consistency

In a blogpost, Stephanie Quesnelle from Data Driven Detroit finds that inspectors are highly variable in the number of violations per inspection. Investigate what this observation indicates about the consistency, effectiveness and fairness of inspectors. Consider this together with the predictors task above; are there any features, such as location or cuisine, which disproportionately affect the inspectors citation behavior?

4

Covid-19

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020 has had drastic effects on restaurant operations (e.g., closure of dine-in services, increased health and cleanliness requirements). Determine if and how evidence of the pandemic is present in the data. Furthermore, explore how local policy changes (e.g., required contact tracing, employee case-related closure, testing and vaccine availability for front-line workers) has affected inspections.

5

Prevention and correction

Citing restaurants for violations, even benign ones, could have a preventive effect. Analyze this claim by investigating if and how the number and importance of violations depends on the number and importance of prior citations, or by identifying predictors of consecutive violations. Furthermore, for priority violations, inspectors may conduct follow-up inspections to ensure a restaurant has corrected the error. Investigate the conditions in which these inspections are conducted and resolved (or not.)

6

Your own theme

While exploring the three datasets, you may encounter additional research questions. If you would like to work on your own questions, feel free to contact us to get them approved for the competition!