Datasets, observations, and variables
A dataset is a collection of data that we're going to use to create new predictions. There are different kinds of datasets. When we use a dataset for predictive analytics, we can consider a dataset like a table with columns and rows.
In a real-life problem, our dataset would be related to the problem we want to solve. If we want to predict which customer is most likely to buy a product, our dataset would probably contain customer and historic sales data. When we're learning, we need to find an appropriate dataset for our learning purposes. You can find a lot of example datasets on the Internet; in this chapter, and in the following one, we're going to use the Titanic passenger list as a dataset that has been taken from Kaggle.
Note
Kaggle is the world's largest community of data scientists. On this website, you can even find data science competitions. We're not going to use the term data science, in this book, because there are a lot of new terms around...
