Getting Started with the Use Case

In this chapter, we will refer to the rainfall prediction problem using the weather dataset, obtained from the Australian Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology and made available through R. The dataset has two target variables, RainTomorrow, a flag indicating whether it will rain tomorrow, and RISK_MM, which measures the amount of rainfall for the following day.

In a nutshell, we can use this dataset for regression as well as classification, since we have two target variables. However, we will drop the continuous target variable and only consider the categorical target variable, RainTomorrow, for our classification exercise. The metadata and additional details about the dataset are available to explore at https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/rattle/versions/5.2.0/topics/weather. Since the dataset is readily available through R, we don't need to separately download it; instead, we can directly use the R function within the rattle library to load the data into...