Geospatial Site-Selection Analysis Using Cosine Similarity

Location is paramount for businesses that operate physical locations, where it is key to be located close to your target market. This challenge is often the case for franchises that are expanding into new areas where it is important to understand the'fit' of a business in a new area. The aim of this article is to explore this idea in more detail, to evaluate the suitability of a new location for a franchise based on the characteristics of areas where existing franchises are located. To achieve this we will be taking data from OpenStreetMap of a popular coffee shop franchise in Seattle, to use information about the surrounding neighbourhood to identify new prospective locations that are similar. As this task is geospatial, using OpenStreetMap and packages like OSMNX and Geopandas will be useful.