A TALE OF THREE CITIES
Introduction
With 174 hours of biking and a bit of ferry combined you can start from Boston, touch Chicago, and reach the city of New York. However different these cities are, they all have one thing in common the 311 service.
The telephone number 3-1-1 creates a central hub for local subscribers to access a variety of city services. 311 provides access to non-emergency municipal services from sewer concerns, pothole problems, abandoned car removal and neighborhood complaints to graffiti removal. This service is available to divert routine inquiries and non-urgent community concerns from the 9-1-1 number which is reserved for emergency service. A promotional website for 3-1-1 in Akron described the distinction as follows: “Burning building? Call 9-1-1. Burning question? Call 3-1-1” (wiki/3-1-1, n.d.)
A recent 15-city study of 311 by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the average cost per 311 call is $3.39. Detroit came in with the highest cost per call at a whopping $7.78. Despite the excessive costs, cities do not appear to be slowing their migration to 311. In fact, many are pushing forward with faith that the increased efficiency, streamlined processes and customer satisfaction they achieve will ultimately pay off (Brown, 2012) .
We have identified the 3-1-1 call dataset from the cities Chicago, Boston and New York city provided by Azure Open Datasets. We believe that data is the new currency, now the question becomes what can we do with the 3-1-1 data and how can that analysis be beneficial?
Value Proposition
This analysis can serve as an exploratory reference, and with refinement can be reused in the optimization of the Maintenance Fiscal budget of a city. The Development and the Maintenance services budget includes General Services, Public Works, Planning & Development and Solid Waste Management. This budget occupies a large portion in a city's overall fiscal budget and by the application and refinement of the descriptive and predictive analytics demonstrated as part of this work we can statistically optimize and predict the overall spending and budgeting. Here is an example of City of Houston’s 2019 Fiscal Year budget breakdown to give an idea of the general breakdown of the development and maintenance services components: https://www.houstontx.gov/budget/19budadopt/I_TABI.pdf
Secondly, this work can be used as a workshop, reference material and self-learning for the following concepts, technologies, and platforms:
- Data Engineering using SparkR, R ecosystem
- Data visualization and descriptive analytics
- Time Series forecasting
- Anomaly detection
- Products used: Azure Databricks, Azure Open Datasets, Azure Blob Storage
In the second phase I plan to develop another flavor solution using Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Machine learning primarily using Python, REST APIs and PySpark.
Focus Area
For the purpose of this analysis, I want to examine how the incidents reported in these three cities are related albeit imperfectly with time, clusters of incidents. Some of the questions and problems that is addressed are as follows:
- Transformation and enrichment of the datasets.
- Perform descriptive analytics on the data.
- Time series analysis and visualization
- Cluster visualization and analysis
- Time series forecasting and comparison using various methods
- Anomaly detection and reporting
- Correlation among the incidents occurring the three cities w.r.t time
Because of the varied nature of the incidents and analysis (descriptive and predictive) that can be performed on them, I demonstrated some of the concepts by means of isolating the pothole repair complaints which also ranks within the top 10 categories of complaints in the three cities (as we will demonstrate here as well). However, these methodologies can be seamlessly applied and reused across other categories of complaints with little modification.
Guiding Principles
The work that will be subsequently done as part of this paper will have at the very least embody the following principles (ai/responsible-ai, n.d.):
- Fair - AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying dignity and guard against bias
- Accountable - AI must have algorithmic accountability
- Transparent - AI systems must be transparent and understandable
- Ethical - AI must assist humanity and be designed for intelligent privacy