Following the strategy adopted in Chapter 8, Learning Analytics on Spark, in this chapter, we will further extend our Spark machine learning application to smart city analytics, for which we will apply machine learning to open data for city analytics. In other words, we will extend the benefit of machine learning on Spark to serving city governments.

Specifically in this chapter, we will first review machine learning methods and related computing for a service request forecasting project and will then discuss how Apache Spark comes in to make them easy. At the same time, with this real-life service forecasting example, we will illustrate step by step our machine learning process of predicting service requests with big data.

Here, we will use the service forecasting project for the purpose of illustrating our technologies and processes. That is, what is described in this chapter is not limited to service request forecasting but can be easily applied to other...