We are nearing the end of our data collection period and have a total of about 60 reports now. Our plans for this and next week are to analyze the usage of the app and how people are interacting with the questions. An initial look at the database and text message exchanges with users shows that there are some inputs that we were not necessarily expecting, such as free-form descriptions of the rats and typing the name of the option instead of the number associated with it. Once we take a deeper look at the reports we have gathered so far, we will be able to make the necessary improvements to the app. In addition, we are also close to finishing our webpage! We are currently in the process of prototyping some designs, but we are very close to deployment and we cannot wait to show you what we’ve made
Work on the modeling side is currently based upon improving the model that predicts the baseline probability of seeing rats. The city of Atlanta is divided up into a grid of smaller squares, and for each square the total count of rat sightings over time, intersection areas of different environmental layers, and counts of restaurants is computed. Currently, we are testing different models such as a poisson regression, zero-inflated poisson regression, and generalized boosted regression model to see which provides the most reasonable and accurate predictions.