The concept of LAD ties together the well-established ideas of analytical datasets and relational databases. Combining them together accelerates how quickly data scientists can get to the part both you and they care about most—the analytics.
The term LAD is being introduced in this book, although the general concepts are not new. However, there does not appear to be a common name for this arrangement, so the intent is to give it one. So, now that we have LAD, let's see if it takes off.
The process of creating analytical datasets is simple in concept but hard in execution. You have probably created one already, whether you know it or not. Analytical datasets combine a bunch of useful features together into each record instance.
This is done for both data understanding purposes (think about Chapter 6, Getting to Know Your Data - Exploring IoT Data) and for ML purposes (think about Chapter 10, Data Science for IoT Analytics). The goal is to combine...