As of Friday last week, the chatbot has been deployed and is now fully functional. 5 days into the collection period, and we already have about 30 reports. However, most of them are on the eastside of Atlanta, not the west. This has prompted us to rethink our marketing strategy on the westside in order to get more reports from the area. We plan on enhancing our advertising efforts for the project on the westside over the next couple of days in order to maximize the number of reports. In the meantime, we are continuing to monitor the reports being made in order to address issues with the software. We are also working very diligently to make the app even more useful to the community by providing visual maps and statistical information about the reports we are gathering. This information will be viewable on our new website in the following weeks, so stay tuned for more information
In addition, historical rat sighting information, code violations, and other environmental data are being used to generate a model to help identify key areas that may be especially prone to rats. After geocoding this data, we were able to compute the intersection areas between the buffers and other environmental layers, create random dummy samples across the city of Atlanta, and derive a multivariate logistic regression model to assess which features had the most importance. Currently, the model includes land use, restaurants, and bodies of water, with plans to incorporate real estate, census data, and tree cover. According to the current model, high and multi-residential land, as well as restaurants, are associated with higher log odds of a rat sighting. This makes sense, although we have to look further to make sure the two are not confounding variables (denser residential areas may have more restaurants).