Building an event predictor

Let's apply all of this knowledge from this chapter to a real-world problem. We will build an SVM to predict the number of people going in and out of a building. The dataset is available at https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/CalIt2+Building+People+Counts. We will use a slightly modified version of this dataset so that it's easier to analyze. The modified data is available in the building_event_binary.txt and the building_event_multiclass.txt files that are already provided to you. In this recipe, we will learn how to build an event predictor.

Getting ready

Let's understand the data format before we start building the model. Each line in building_event_binary.txt consists of...