Hello, and welcome to our statistical side project! I'm Violet Evans, and alongside my classmate Gloria Su, we embarked on this side project fueled by our shared love for bubble tea. Originating from Taiwan, bubble tea, also known as boba, has become a beloved sweet beverage worldwide. As Asian Americans raised in North Carolina, we frequently longed for authentic Asian cuisines in the Triangle that would reconnect us with our heritage. Growing up, boba culture wasn't large. However, the popularity of boba in the broader Raleigh area has surged, coinciding with the arrival of nearly 40,000 households and businesses between 2018 and 2022. This growth has brought a number of trendy Asian boba shops to the region. A boba subculture began to rise among young Asian Americans around the time we started our undergraduate studies at UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, and we've been enthusiastic consumers of boba ever since.
Continuing the momentum inspired by bubble tea and Asian cuisine, our GitHub repository is named "Xiaolongbao", which translates to "soup dumpling" in Chinese. This repository is organized into two main folders: the Data and R folders. The Data folder holds all of the data in CSV form we scraped from the Yelp API, as well as our statistical analysis output. The R folder holds all of the R Markdown files that we used over the course of this semester. It is ordered by timeline, starting at week 8 and finishing at week 11. The general Xiaolongbao folder holds additional project materials, such as the slide deck we used for our presentation that delivered our project findings and insights to master's-level data science students and our Tableau dashboard based on boba shop longitude and latitude coordinates.
For our statistical side project, we provided a comprehensive study on boba shop Yelp reviews from Raleigh, North Carolina, and New York City, New York, in a quest to determine what makes the highest-rated shops.
We performed the following:
- Requested developer access to Yelp API with an application.
- Chose Yelp API parameters for the type of review and location.
- Used longitude/latitude information to visualize boba shops in Tableau.
- Presented our statistical findings on October 30th, 2023 at the Institute for Advanced Analytics.
The home page of the Xiaolongbao directory holds our Bookdown website— we hope you enjoy reading about our work!