Java: Data Science Made Easy

Preparing the data

We will use a car evaluation database to demonstrate how to predict the acceptability of a car based on a series of attributes. The file containing the data we will be using can be downloaded from: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/car/car.data. It consists of car data such as price, number of passengers, and safety information, and an assessment of its overall quality. It is this latter element, quality, that we will try to predict. The comma-delimited values in each attribute are shown next, along with substitutions. The substitutions are needed because the model expects numeric data:

Attribute	Original value	Substituted value
Buying price	vhigh, high, med, low	3,2,1,0
Maintenance price