A Business Zone Recommender System Based on Facebook and Urban Planning Data

TL;DR

ZoneRec is a machine learning-based system that recommends optimal urban zones for new businesses by integrating Facebook business data and urban planning information, demonstrated with food businesses in Singapore.

Contribution

Introduces a novel zone recommendation system combining social media and urban planning data for business placement.

Findings

Effective zone recommendations for food businesses in Singapore.

Feature importance analysis shows urban planning data significantly impacts recommendations.

System outperforms baseline methods in accuracy.

Abstract

We present ZoneRec---a zone recommendation system for physical businesses in an urban city, which uses both public business data from Facebook and urban planning data. The system consists of machine learning algorithms that take in a business' metadata and outputs a list of recommended zones to establish the business in. We evaluate our system using data of food businesses in Singapore and assess the contribution of different feature groups to the recommendation quality.