Which city should Uber start services in next?

Here‘s my presentation on where Uber should open next. Too busy for a presentation? Here’s a map I created showing the top cities where Uber will open next:

Made using R packages:ggmap, maps, ggplot2 and edited in Adobe Photoshop

Now that I’ve done both Uber and Ola, maybe I’ll predict where certain banks will open next. Stay tuned for what’s to come.

Which city should Ola Cabs start services in next?

Ola Cabs—India’s largest taxi service provider—are responsible for my travel to and from basketball practice, friends’ houses and school (when I miss the bus), so it’s only fair that we give Ola due respect. Last time we analyzed where Domino’s pizza should open stores. Let’s now run our recommender algorithm and see where Ola Cabs should (and hopefully, will) start services next.

Here is my presentation detailing my model’s top recommendations for where Ola cabs should open.

If you don’t have the time to go through a 15-slide presentation, here’s the skinny on my model’s recommendations. These are the cities where I predict Ola cabs will open next:

Made using R packages:ggmap, ggplot2, ggmap; Edited using Adobe Photoshop

Next, I’ll be doing the same for Ola’s top competitor—Uber. And of course, I’ll write about how these ‘predictions’ fare next quarter.

Which city will Domino’s pizza open in?

I’ve worked with recommender systems to predict where Bajaj Finance and Capital First would open next. You can see those posts here and here.

So what about where Domino’s pizza?—the chain that really started my obsession with recommender systems and business analytics. When I just started my project, I ran a small scale prediction for Domino’s pizza.

Quoting from an earlier blog post “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.”

Let’s bring out the big guns for Domino’s pizza now, shall we? Let’s run the full-fledged model and see if my predictions prove true one more time. Here are my model’s mapped predictions for the next 10 cities where Domino’s will open stores:

Made with R packages:ggmap, ggplot2, maps and edited in Adobe Photoshop

If you’re interested, here are the next 10 recommendations for where Domino’s pizza will open: Malegaon, Khammam, Agartala, Kumbakonam, Srinagar, Chittoor, Muktsar, Raichur, Tarn Taran, Akola.

Why don’t these cities look familiar? Because Domino’s pizza has already opened in 292 cities; they are now targeting the smaller towns.

I’ll keep you updated on how my predictions fare. I’ll also post predictions for more franchises’ store openings. Stay tuned.

Update: Kottayam has a Domino’s store. I collected the data to build these predictions in September 2016. So it looks like one of our ten predictions has proved true in only two months. Let’s see what happens to the other 9.

Where should Capital First open next?

Which cities should Capital first open in next? These recommendations are based on the same model and same code as my recommendations for Bajaj Finance (with a few Capital First specific tweaks).

Here is my presentation on where Capital First should open branches next. Here is the code behind it.

I’ll be uploading recommendations for new franchises soon. I will also be talking about more technical matters – gathering, cleaning the data behind the model, User-based collaborative filtering, analyzing and building the model
and tracking how my ‘predictions’ perform over the new few months. Stay tuned for what’s to come.