392285 ISY Project: Unravelling the canteen menu generation through data mining (Pj) (SoSe 2023)

Have you ever wondered why they serve noodles as side dish for spaghetti in the canteen of Bielefeld University? Or have you longed for a splendid bowl of swedish apple creme just to find out that they are simply not offering any? Fear no more. Over the past 8 months, we have scraped the website of the Studierendenwerk to gather the weekly canteen plan. This raw information will build the data set that this project aims to analyze more closely. The idea is to execute the typical pipeline of data selection, preprocessing, transformation, mining and interpretation to uncover hidden patterns in a scientifically sound and structured way on a real world data set with all of its flaws, errors and missing fields. The results of the project will be summarized in a written report whose length depends on the group size. Will saithe from Alaska play a larger role than we all anticipate? At the current point in time, we simply don't know. But we are eager to find out. Possible research questions for this project include:
- Which (family of) algorithms works best to predict main dish X?
- Can you find meaningful clusters of dishes appearing at the same time and how do they relate to each other?
- How consistent is the canteen plan to itself? Are there any regularities like predictable repetitions?

In case the proposal would not attract enough students for a team project, it can be adapted into an individual project or a project for two students (tandem project).