Restaurant Recommendation System using Python

A recommendation system is one of the popular applications of Data Science. A restaurant recommendation system is an application that recommends similar restaurants to a customer according to the customer’s taste. If you want to learn how to build a restaurant recommendation system, this article is for you. This article will take you through how to build a restaurant recommendation system using Python.

Restaurant Recommendation System using Python

A restaurant recommendation system is an application that recommends similar restaurants to a customer according to the customer’s taste. To build a restaurant recommender system using Python, I have collected data from Kaggle. You can download the dataset for this task from here.

Now let’s import the necessary Python libraries and the dataset we need for this task:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.feature_extraction import text
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

data = pd.read_csv("TripAdvisor_RestauarantRecommendation.csv")
print(data.head())
                            Name       Street Address  \
0  Betty Lou's Seafood and Grill     318 Columbus Ave   
1              Coach House Diner        55 State Rt 4   
2               Table Talk Diner  2521 South Rd Ste C   
3                    Sixty Vines     3701 Dallas Pkwy   
4                   The Clam Bar    3914 Brewerton Rd   

                       Location                                          Type  \
0  San Francisco, CA 94133-3908   Seafood, Vegetarian Friendly, Vegan Options   
1     Hackensack, NJ 07601-6337          Diner, American, Vegetarian Friendly   
2   Poughkeepsie, NY 12601-5476          American, Diner, Vegetarian Friendly   
3          Plano, TX 75093-7777       American, Wine Bar, Vegetarian Friendly   
4            Syracuse, NY 13212                        American, Bar, Seafood   

            Reviews No of Reviews  \
0  4.5 of 5 bubbles   243 reviews   
1    4 of 5 bubbles    84 reviews   
2    4 of 5 bubbles   256 reviews   
3  4.5 of 5 bubbles   235 reviews   
4    4 of 5 bubbles   285 reviews   

                                            Comments   Contact Number  \
0                                                NaN  +1 415-757-0569   
1  Both times we were there very late, after 11 P...  +1 201-488-4999   
2  Waitress was very friendly but a little pricey...  +1 845-849-2839   
3  Not sure why I went there for the second time....  +1 469-620-8463   
4  Doesn't look like much from the outside but wa...  +1 315-458-1662   

                                    Trip_advisor Url  \
0  https://www.tripadvisor.com//Restaurant_Review...   
1  https://www.tripadvisor.com//Restaurant_Review...   
2  https://www.tripadvisor.com//Restaurant_Review...   
3  https://www.tripadvisor.com//Restaurant_Review...   
4  https://www.tripadvisor.com//Restaurant_Review...   

                                        Menu Price_Range  
0               Check The Website for a Menu    $$ - $$$  
1               Check The Website for a Menu    $$ - $$$  
2  http://tabletalkdiner.com/menu/breakfast/    $$ - $$$  
3      https://sixtyvines.com/menu/plano-tx/    $$ - $$$  
4               Check The Website for a Menu    $$ - $$$  

I will select two columns from the dataset for the rest of the task (Name, Type):

data = data[["Name", "Type"]]
print(data.head())
                            Name                                          Type
0  Betty Lou's Seafood and Grill   Seafood, Vegetarian Friendly, Vegan Options
1              Coach House Diner          Diner, American, Vegetarian Friendly
2               Table Talk Diner          American, Diner, Vegetarian Friendly
3                    Sixty Vines       American, Wine Bar, Vegetarian Friendly
4                   The Clam Bar                        American, Bar, Seafood

Before moving forward, let’s have a look at whether the data contains any null values or not:

print(data.isnull().sum())
Name     0
Type    13
dtype: int64

So the data has some null values in the Type column. I will delete the rows containing null values before moving forward:

data = data.dropna()

The type of restaurant is a valuable feature in the data to build a recommendation system. The type column here represents the category of restaurants. For example, if a customer likes vegetarian-friendly restaurants, he will only look at the recommendations if they are vegetarian friendly too. So I will use the Type column as the feature to recommend similar restaurants to the customer:

feature = data["Type"].tolist()
tfidf = text.TfidfVectorizer(input=feature, stop_words="english")
tfidf_matrix = tfidf.fit_transform(feature)
similarity = cosine_similarity(tfidf_matrix)

Now I will set the name of the restaurant as an index so that we can find similar restaurants by giving the name of the restaurant as an input:

indices = pd.Series(data.index, index=data['Name']).drop_duplicates()

Now here’s how to write a function to recommend similar restaurants:

def restaurant_recommendation(name, similarity = similarity):
    index = indices[name]
    similarity_scores = list(enumerate(similarity[index]))
    similarity_scores = sorted(similarity_scores, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
    similarity_scores = similarity_scores[0:10]
    restaurantindices = [i[0] for i in similarity_scores]
    return data['Name'].iloc[restaurantindices]

print(restaurant_recommendation("Market Grill"))
23                   The Lion's Share
154                        Houlihan's
518            Midgley's Public House
568                 Aspen Creek Grill
770              Pete's Sunset Grille
1190     Paul Martin's American Grill
1581                   Aviation Grill
1872                   Aviation Grill
2193                Crest Bar & Grill
2612    Tahoe Joe's Famous Steakhouse
Name: Name, dtype: object

Summary

So this is how to build a restaurant recommender system using the Python programming language. A restaurant recommender system is an application that recommends similar restaurants to a customer according to the customer’s taste. I hope you liked this article on building a restaurant recommender system using Python. Feel free to ask valuable questions in the comments section below.

Aman Kharwal
Aman Kharwal

I'm a writer and data scientist on a mission to educate others about the incredible power of data📈.

Articles: 1498

Leave a Reply