Opening a Restaurant in Tokyo, Japan

Here is the final IBM Capstone Project, which comprised the blog and snippet of the code written in the Jupyter notebook. The objectives of these assignments are to define a business problem, research data on the web and ability to use foursquare location data to compare different districts within the wards of Tokyo. The choice of a city depends on how to figure out which neighborhood is suitable for starting a restaurant business. 

1. Discussion and Background of the Business Problem:

Tokyo is the most populous city in the world. Now the city is rank third in the global economic power index, Tokyo is suggest the business hub if one wish to start one.

Researching during the daytime, especially in the morning and lunch hours, office areas provide enormous opportunities for restaurants. Reasonably priced (one lunch meal 8$) shops are usually always full during the lunch hours (11 am — 2 pm), and, given this scenario, we will go through the benefits and pitfalls of opening a breakfast cum lunch restaurant in highly dense office places. Usually, the profit margin for a decent restaurant lies within the 15−20percentage range, but it can even go high enough to 35%, as discussed in this project. Tokyo has up of 23 wards (municipalities) but, I will later concentrate on five busiest wards of Tokyo — Chiyoda, Chuo, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Shinagawa, to target daily office workers.

I will go through steps of this project and address them separately. I first outline the initial data preparation and describe future steps to start the battle of neighborhoods in Tokyo.

Target Audience

What type of customers or a group of people would be interested in this project?

1. Business personnel:  

A business oriented with comprehensive guide to start or expand restaurants targeting the large pool of office workers in Tokyo during lunch hours.

2. A freelancer who loves to have a place to feed people as a side business. This analysis will give an idea, how beneficial it is to open a restaurant and what are the pros and cons of this business.

3. New graduates, to find reasonable lunch/breakfast place close to the office.

4. Budding Data Scientists, who want to implement some of the most used Exploratory Data Analysis techniques to obtain necessary data, analyze it, and, finally be able to tell a story out of it.

2. Data Preparation

Data was Scraped from wiki on Special Wards of Tokyo page to create a data-frame. I have used requests and Beautifulsoup4 library to create a data-frame containing name of the 23 wards of Tokyo, Area, population and 1st Major District showing above.

I use some transformation tools and here is the data-frame