Spark for service forecasting

In this section, we will describe a real use case of predicting service requests in detail and then describe how to prepare Apache Spark computing for this real-life project.

The use case

In the United States, and worldwide, more and more cities have made their collected data open to the public. As a result, city governments and many other organizations have performed machine learning on these open datasets with good insight into improving decision making and a lot of positive impact, for example, in New York and Chicago. Using large amount of open data is becoming a trend now. For example, using big data to measure cities is becoming a research trend, as we can note from http://files.meetup.com/11744342/CITY_RANKING_Oct7.pdf.

Using data analytics for cities has a wide impact as more than half of us live in urban centers now, and the percentage is still increasing. Therefore, what you will learn in this chapter will enable data scientists to create a huge positive...