Uncovering Insights from Restaurant Health Inspection Records to Enhance Public Food Safety

Measures that restaurants must adopt to comply with food safety regulations may increase costs, tempting them to violate the regulations. Inspections conducted by regulatory agencies are crucial in monitoring restaurants’ compliance and urging them to take appropriate countermeasures when necessary. In practice, multiple violations may be found during an inspection. Different types of violations may pose different levels of food safety risk to the public. The overall safety risk depends on the co-occurrences of multiple violations. Yet, regulatory agencies are facing challenges in identifying the associations between violations and food safety risks, and areas that inspectors should pay closer attention to during inspections. This study utilizes association rule mining approaches to identify the relationships between violations and food safety risks. Analyzing the restaurant inspection records from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene shows that maintaining proper food storage temperatures, cleanliness and sanitation practices, and ensuring the vermin-proofing of facilities are critical factors in upholding high food safety standards.