Python Machine Learning Cookbook

Building an event predictor

Let's apply all of this knowledge to a real-world problem. We will build an SVM to predict the number of people going in and out of a building. The dataset is available at https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/CalIt2+Building+People+Counts. We will use a slightly modified version of this dataset so that it's easier to analyze. The modified data is available in the building_event_binary.txt and building_event_multiclass.txt files that are already provided to you.

Getting ready

Let's understand the data format before we start building the model. Each line in building_event_binary.txt consists of six comma-separated strings. The ordering of these six strings is as follows:

• Day
• Date
• Time
• The number of people going out of the ...