Practical Predictive Analytics

Text file Input

The most convenient way to read data into a predictive analytics project is via an input text file. Text files are convenient and work well for small and medium projects. You can examine text files using many different kinds of program in human readable form. However, as the data gets larger, it may be that storing data in text files becomes a bit unmanageable, and you might have to turn to retrieving directly from data warehouses, both from the SQL and NoSQL variety, and possibly incorporate ecosystems such as Spark and Hadoop, in which you will begin to use parallel processing and memory management techniques.