Why open data?

Many books on machine learning use datasets that come with the language install (such as R or Hadoop) or point to public repositories that have considerable visibility in the data science community. The most common ones are Kaggle (especially the Titanic competition) and the UC Irvine's datasets. While these are great datasets and give a common denominator, this book will expose you to datasets that come from government entities. The notion of getting data from government and hacking for social good is typically called open data. I believe that open data will transform how the government interacts with its citizens and will make government entities more efficient and transparent. Therefore, we will use open datasets in this book and hopefully you will consider helping out with the open data movement.