We’ve finished up the structured curriculum at galvanize and are now working on our capstone projects. I had a bit of flip flopping in picking a project topic. While I’m (obviously) really interested in healthcare applications of data science, there are fewer open data sources available. I poked around a few available datasets but ultimately decided on a non-healthcare project that I think will challenge me more and give me more opportunity to show off my newly-developed skills. Also it’s food-related, which is probably right up there with healthcare on my interests list.

Yum!

For the past week, I worked on building a cross-domain recommender system that will allow a user to input one of their favorite restaurants in SF and receive a recipe they might enjoy. So far, I have a simple model that will compute the similarity between the given restaurant’s menu and all the recipes in my database, based on text analysis of the menu’s item descriptions and the recipes ingredient list. I also have a Flask app up and running (only on my local machine so far, so no links to it yet but soon!) I’m pretty happy with my progress this week, as I still have the upcoming week to play around with the model. I’d like to try some more sophisticated text mining techniques that will hopefully result in better recommendations.

If you’re interested in building simple web apps or websites, I definitely recommend checking out Bootstrap templates. See Start Bootstrap for some free, downloadable templates. With just a tiny bit of HTML and CSS knowledge, you can customize the templates and make your site look really slick. It took me maybe an hour to go from a barebones, text-only website to a nicely formatted, image-rich design. Can’t wait to share the finished product!