Creating the final dataset

Therefore, it is time to create our final dataset that we will use to build our models. We will convert our DataFrame into an RDD of LabeledPoints.

A LabeledPoint is a MLlib structure that is used to train the machine learning models. It consists of two attributes: label and features.

The label is our target variable and features can be a NumPy array, list, pyspark.mllib.linalg.SparseVector, pyspark.mllib.linalg.DenseVector, or scipy.sparse column matrix.

Creating an RDD of LabeledPoints

Before we build our final dataset, we first need to deal with one final obstacle: our 'BIRTH_PLACE' feature is still a string. While any of the other categorical variables can be used as is (as they are now dummy variables), we will use a hashing trick to encode the 'BIRTH_PLACE' feature:

import pyspark.mllib.feature as ft
import pyspark.mllib.regression as reg
hashing = ft.HashingTF(7)
births_hashed = births_transformed \
    .rdd \
    .map(lambda row: [
            list(hashing.transform...