To continue our machine learning on Spark, we will further extend our application to serve the educational sector in this chapter and the government sector in next chapter. Specifically, in this chapter, we will extend our application to serve learning organizations, such as universities and training institutions, for which we will apply machine learning to improve the learning analytics for a real case of predicting student attrition. In the next chapter, we will utilize our Apache Spark machine learning to serve city governments, for which we will demonstrate our application with a real use case of predicting service requests.

By following the structures and processes established in previous chapters, in this chapter, we will first review machine learning methods and related computing for the real case of predicting student attrition, and we will then discuss how Apache Spark comes in to make them easy. At the same time, by working on this real-life...