Exploring and understanding the dataset

Before starting the development of the machine learning model, we'll start looking at the dataset and its structure.

Let's start by getting a clear understanding of the time series data that we have in the BigQuery public dataset to build our forecasting model in the next section.

Understanding the data

In this section, we'll analyze the structure of the data to identify the fields to use for the machine learning model creation.

To start exploring the data, we need to do the following:

1. Log into our Google Cloud Console and access the BigQuery user interface from the navigation menu.
2. Create a new dataset under the project that we created in Chapter 2, Setting Up Your GCP and BigQuery Environment. For this use case, we'll create the dataset 08_sales_forecasting with the default options.
3. Open the GCP project bigquery-public-data that hosts the BigQuery public datasets and browse the datasets until...