Back in May I finally made it to L&B Spumoni Gardens and Slice was right, it is a Rite of Passage and totally worth the subway ride.

My friend and I got a sicilian pie (12 slices) half plain and half mushrooms.  They make it in an upside down style similar to New York Pizza Suprema, but it is the atmosphere that really makes L&B.  You can feel the ocean breeze as you sit at picnic style tables outdoors.  Quite an experience.

We finished off the meal with their signature Spumoni.  I forget what flavor I got, but as you can it was extremely tasty and a great way to top off the pizza.

Spumoni at L&B Spumoni Gardens

It also gets approval from Man v Food’s Adam Richman who visited some time last season (or the first?).

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Thanks to some early data from Pizza Girl, of Slice fame, I have some very preliminary findings.

There are a few different ways to tip, check (only one person did this), credit card at the door, pre-tipping with a credit card and cash.  As seen in these boxplots, cash tippers were the highest, on average.  Pre-tippers, who really are just tipping based on feeling, not performance, have the greatest variability.  There was even someone who only pre-tipped a dollar.  Pre-tipping a large amount might be a good idea–kind of like greasing a palm at a restaurant to get a table–but I don’t see how a small pre-tip is a good idea.

I wonder why people give bigger tips with cash than with credit cards.  I would have thought it would be the other way around.

This is just the beginning.  Pizza Girl is providing more data as the weeks go on.  And as I get more data the analysis will become more sophisticated, so stay tuned as we unravel the world of pizza delivery.  In the mean time, check out Pizza Girl’s third installment of her findings on Slice.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

The other day, I was working near Houston street, teaching a class on QlikView (which itself could be a great post topic about data munging for statisticians).  On the last day of the class we decided to head to Bleecker street for a pizza feast.

We got two pies from Keste (Pizza del Pappa and the Margherita), a large pie from John’s of Bleecker (half plain, half sausage and pepporoni) and a large cheese pie from Joe’s. Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Pizza Girl, a pizza delivery girl who is a regular contributor on Slice, tallied up and analyzed the time she spends on various duties in her pizzeria.  This is just the first part in a series, but so far she determined that she spends 67% of her shift driving.

According to her pay schedule, she makes less money while driving ($4.95/hr) than she does while in the pizzeria ($7.50). Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Thanks to Drew Conway for posting this video of me dicussing my thesis (pdf) on NYC pizza.  It was part of the New York R User Meetup on Applications of R.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Slice recently reported that Fark user “Certainly You Jest” tabulated a list of the 25 most mentioned pizzerias.  Naturally, I decided to play with the numbers.  Rather than write up another formal paper, I did some quick ad hoc analysis for posting on this blog and I will skip some of the more technical aspects.

First, I augmented the data with the price of a typical plain pie that could feed two to four people and the pizzeria’s distance from New York City.  Adding the distance meant I had to remove the multi-state chains, like Monical’s, from the data.

While the number of times a pizzeria is mentioned is count data, it doesn’t quite fit a poisson distribution, and the poisson regression didn’t seem to be a good fit.  This makes sense since I have three predictors (distance from New York, price and their interaction).  You can see this in the two histograms below.

  Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

This Thursday, April 8th, I’ll be giving two brief talks (5 to 10 minutes) about statistical methods at the New York R User Meetup.  The first will be applying multilevel models to World Health Organization data to study noncommunicable diseases.  The second, and probably more fun, will be a presentation of my pizza paper (pdf) that was featured on Slice.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

I don’t mean to shamelessly self-promote here, but I wanted to note that the Slice story on my pizza paper (pdf) has also been picked up by NBC New York’s food blog, Feast, and by Revolution Computing’s blog.  For people who don’t know, Revolution Computing optimizes R, the language used by a large number of statisticians for computations.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

The Slice article got picked up by MidtownLunch.

A lot of people have been asking for my favorite pizza places.  The answer depends on what type of pizza I’m looking for, but Maffei’s grandma slice and and Keste are two places that pop into my head a lot.

Someone at the ML forum asked about New York Pizza Suprema, and yes, I love their upside down slice.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Slice has a nice writeup of a paper I wrote performing a statistical analysis of New York City.  The article is nicely written and distills the analysis to the parts people will care about.  See here for the corresponding PowerPoint presentation.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.