Introduced by Deep Dave, David Lin, Sharon Ng, Vanessa Salas and Alexandre Vincent
As you can imagine, there is a wealth of data on most topics in the Internet Age. Data on stock prices, the housing market and energy consumption are just a few of the areas with a large amount of data available to the public. But how can you use this data to make informed decisions in your own life?
Four students from Data-X, a data and machine learning course at UC Berkeley, set out to answer this question and make data-driven decision a little bit easier for travelers.
Originally, the students planned to work with available data sets to answer the questions “When is the best time to buy plane tickets?”. They found, however, that data in relation to this specific inquiry was limited. After weeks of searching for right data set, they found that data sets from Kaggle, a website dedicated to providing open data, only included flight times and Department of Transportation data sets only included yearly flight prices.
So the students decided to alter their project to make a data set themselves. They scraped flight data on a daily basis in order to create a workable database that can help others pinpoint when the right time is to book their flight.