To Catch a... Rat: Maven Restaurant Inspections

About this project

I completed this project as part of the Maven Analytics Power BI Service course.

The objectives of this project were:

1. To examine inspection volumes by county and restaurant.
2. To examine the trend in violations over the period that data was collected.
3. To compare different counties in terms of the number and types of violations.

The Dataset

This dataset was provided by Maven Analytics and contained seven csv files:

• calendar_lookup contains transaction dates from 7/1/2015 to 12/31/2017.
• city_lookup provides data on the city locations of restaurants.
• inspector_lookup contains data on individual inspector names, their email addresses and assigned regions.
• region_lookup contains data on 16 regions and their IDs.
• resturant_inspection_data is the largest table with 25 columns and 901,847 rows.
• restaurant_name_lookup contains the names of all restaurants.
• sanitary_grade_lookup contains 3 sanitation grades, A, B, & C.

Steps

I created a new workspace called "Maven Inspectional Services” and loaded my files as tables.

I then downloaded the standard mode gateway and set it up.

After that, I created a new dataflow, added my first entity, and named the dataflow "Inspection Data" when I was prompted. NB: When copy/pasting the file path, make sure to delete the quotation marks, else you'll get an error.

I refreshed my new dataflow to allow me to connect to it from Power BI Desktop, and then added all my remaining entities. I then used Power Query to make transformations to my entities to ensure I got the desired columns, headers were promoted and my data was clean and consistent.

In Model View, I created table relationships between my lookup tables and data table, ensuring one-to-many cardinality.

I then created DAX measures that would enable me to build a good report.

I then embarked on building a good report and learned how to pin visuals to a dashboard along the way.