CALIFORNIA TRAVEL GUIDE

Table of Content

Introduction

This webpage provides an overview of the final project that we did for the STA 141B class. The contributors of this projects are: Stephanie (Hiu Man) Lam, Chloe (Jieyi) Chen, and Janet Loyola
We divided our project into 4 parts, which include data wrangling and anaylsis, vistualization, review analysis, and interactive user input. At the end of this page, we will provide links to the Jupyter Notebooks where the codes locate.

With our passion of traveling, we are interested in helping visitors to create an ideal travel plan in California. Specifically, we will be focusing on only 3 categories:
- hotels, restaurants, and landmarks.

The Techniques that we use are web data processing, interactive data vistualization, natural language processing, and interactive user input using Python.

I. Data Wrangling

Extracted and collected data from the Yelp Search API and performed a web scraping from Wikipedia page, we created a dataframe with business and California cities information.

The head of our final dataframe for the category restaurant:

II. Analysis and Vistualization

Since we want our users to be able to keep track of the different categories that they might be interested in, we used interactive plots to provide a better user experience.

The Restaurant Category

The Hotel Category

The Landmarks Category

III. Review Analysis

We used natural language processing to analyze the reviews from the Yelp API and find the common words that are used in the review by analyzing the best rated nearby restaurants, hotels and landmarks for all the cities in California. The results are shown below:

For restaurants:

For Hotels:

For Landmarks:

IV. Interactive User Input

With the application of interactive user input functions, we want to provide a basic info of the city and the best recommendations of restaurants, hotels and landmarks to the users based on their preferences. Below are the sample results that we got from the functions:

Please enter the city that you want to visit: san fransicso

Welcome to the city of San Francisco! We are excited to provide you an ideal travel guide to help you explore this wonderful city!
	    
Here is some basic info of the city of San Francisco!
	    
San Francisco (SF) (/sæn frənˈsɪskoʊ/, Spanish for Saint Francis; Spanish: [san fran.ˈθis.ko]), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations.[23][24][25] Located at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula, San Francisco is about 47.9 square miles (124 km2)[17] in area, making it the smallest county—and the only consolidated city-county[26]—within the state of California. With a density of about 18,451 people per square mile (7,124 people per km2), San Francisco is the most densely settled large city (population greater than 200,000) in California and the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City.[27] San Francisco is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, and the 13th-most populous city in the United States—with a census-estimated 2015 population of 864,816.[20] The city and its surrounding areas are known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and are a part of the larger OMB-designated San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth most populous in the nation with an estimated population of 8.7 million.

Which accommondation do you want us to recommend? For example, restaurants, hotels or landmarks:  restaurants
	    
What is your favorite kinds of food?  chinese
	    
What is your preferred range of rating for restaurants? 1,4 

You enter City: San Francisco, CA, Restaurant Category: Chinese, Lower_bound Rating: 1, Upper_bound Rating: 4 
We are sorry. We can not find a restaurant that meets your criterias in our database. Please try a different kinds of food or rating. But first, let's look at the TOP 5 alternatives that we find.

Are you satisfied with the results?  no
	    
Ok, let's try again.  
	    
Which accommondation do you want us to recommend? For example, restaurants, hotels or landmarks:  restaurants
	    
What is your favorite kinds of food?  japanese
	    
What is your preferred range of rating for restaurants? 3,5 

You enter City: San Francisco, CA, Restaurant Category: Japanese, Lower_bound Rating: 1, Upper_bound Rating: 4 

Which accommondation do you want us to recommend? For example, restaurants, hotels or landmarks:  hotels
	    
What is your favorite kinds of food?  hotels
	    
What is your preferred range of rating for restaurants? 1,4 

You enter City: San Francisco, CA, Restaurant Category: Hotels, Lower_bound Rating: 1, Upper_bound Rating: 4 

Are you satisfied with the results?  Yes

Thanks for using our system. We wish you have a wonderful trip.

Conclusion & Next Step

This travel guide has provided a comprehensive analysis for most restaurants, hotels and landmarks in California and make recommendations based on the users' preferences. Our next step will be creating a website that gets the user inputs displays the recommendations and plots. We will need to find a larger database that will contain more information and a web server that allows dynamic content. Furthermore, we will use this project as a template to create travel guides for other states as well.

Code

The links below are the html form of project jupyter notebooks, each file would include the codes and results that we used in the project.

• Part I: Data Wrangling
• Part II: Analysis and Vistualization
• Part III: Basic_Info
• Part IV: Review Analysis

Project Github Repository