City of Long Beach Business Licensing Trend Analysis

About

Are there any seasonality patterns in business licensing activity? For example, the licenses in the latter half of the year generally take longer because there is a lot of construction going on. What is the overall trend of licensing activity? This analysis attempts to find out!

Project Organization

├── LICENSE
├── README.md          <- The top-level README for developers using this project.
├── R                  <- Provides R functions representing commonly used analyses.
├── data
│   ├── external       <- Data from third party sources.
│   ├── interim        <- Intermediate data that has been transformed.
│   ├── processed      <- The final, canonical data sets for modeling.
│   └── raw            <- The original, immutable data dump.
│
├── doc                <- Contains any useful documentation, data dictionaries, screenshots, notes, etc.
├── figs               <- Contains generated figures.
├── packrat            <- Packrat project files and libraries
└── src                <- Source code or notebooks for use in this project.

Required Dependencies

• R
• Packrat:a dependency management system for R.

Getting Started

• Clone this repo to your computer.
• Install above dependencies into your R development enviornment, if you haven't already.
• Run mkdir data/raw/ to create a directory for our source datasets.
• Import the latest business licensing datasets as detailed in the source datasets section into /data/raw/.
• Run mkdir data/interim/ to store intermediate datasets for consumption by other code, notebooks, or analysis tools in your stack.
• Open the R Notebook from src/analysis.Rmd in RStudio to run the analysis.

Source Datasets

Business licensing data is provided by the City of Long Beach's Financial Management department. We have an internal postgresql database on virtual server clbisandev02 that serves as the target destination for ETLs that transfers data from the city's Hansen/LMR system every morning.

Export the following CSV's from the hansen_staging postgres schema on clbisandev02 into /data/raw:

Expected file	Source table	Description
business_licenses.csv	business_license	Primary source of record containing information on all of the business licenses issued and administered by the City.
milestones.csv	milestone	A “log” recording change of status for each business license or application by date/time and inspector.