Restaurants Review Star Prediction for Yelp Dataset

Yelp connects people to great local businesses. In this paper, we focus on the reviews for restaurants. We aim to predict the rating for a restaurant from previous information, such as the review text, the user’s review histories, as well as the restaurant’s statistic. We investigate the data set provided by Yelp Dataset Challenge round 5. In this project, we will predict the star(rating) of a review.Three machine learning algorithms are used, linear regression, random forest tree and latent factor model, combining with the sentiment analysis. After analyzed the performance of each models, the best model for predicting the ratings from reviews is the random forest tree algorithm. Also, we found sentiment features are very useful for rating prediction.