Data crawling and cluster analysis of online reviews in Xi’an catering industry

Abstract

Nowadays, online reviews on the social network play an important role in catering industry. However, the acquisition and analysis of massive review data propose challenges for researchers and practitioners. In this study, a web crawler program is designed to collect the data of reviews of restaurants in Xi’an, China, from a famous Chinese social network, then the features of customers are visualized, and the segmentation of restaurants is analyzed by unsupervised learning. The contribution of this study could help catering researchers and practitioners better understand the features of customers and restaurants.