Building a model that predicts where Domino’s pizza should open

Picking up where I left off on my last blog post, I decided to work on Domino’s Pizza and see what I’d find. I got to work and applied user-based collaborative filtering to my franchise data of store locations for Domino’s Pizza, Eicher Motors, Hero MotoCorp, Cafe Coffee Day, Inox Movies and V-Mart from back in 2015. I found a package called recommenderlab in R and (I’ll spare you the technical details) built a model to recommend locations for franchise openings. I was prepared to run my program right away, but first I had to make sure this model could predict franchise locations at least somewhat accurately. I had to make sure my program worked.

To do this, I took store location data for Domino’s Pizza that I’d collected back in 2015 and ran my model. It told me that Bharatpur, Chittorgarh and Palakkad were the top 3 towns Domino’s should open in. I went onto the Domino’s locations web page to see if I’d struck gold. And I had. One year later, Domino’s now has stores open in Chittorgarh and Palakkad.

This really excites me because if this holds true for other franchises, then maybe I’ll know where franchises are going to open before they do. And maybe, to some degree,  I’ll be able to recommend cities for companies to open in.