Not Just Tacos and Burritos

Inspiration

The challenge by Goldman Sachs was to find insights into taco and burrito business data. We were inspired by our appreciation of tacos and burritos as College Students to create a tool that provides location based insights into food prices and business information.

What it does

Our tool, the College Student Taco Finder 2000, provides the user with a straightforward map GUI for finding taco/burrito businesses based on storefront and product categories (Pub, Restaurant, Taco, Burrito, etc.), and median pricing. A histogram below the map interface provides a general idea of the taco/burrito availability at various prices, and supplemental maps that indicate concentration zones for higher prices via a heat map and US income distribution via a map overlay.

How I built it

We used R-Studio to wrangle the data, create an interactive UI, and implement heatmaps. We also utilized 7 different libraries to accomplish this.

Challenges we ran into

We were often challenged by the unfamiliar syntax and functions of R-Studio and the libraries we decided to use. The data set was also very messy to begin with, so our team was challenged to clean and filter the data properly.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are extremely proud of creating an entire project in R-Studio, using 7 different libraries that we were completely unfamiliar with at the beginning of the TAMU Datathon. Furthermore, we are proud of all the data wrangling we were able to do using methods we learned throughout this event. Lastly, as 3 MEEN students with minimal CS/data science experience, we were excited to have the opportunity to learn more; we are beyond thrilled that we were able to create a competitive product and walk away with tangible experience.