Path: blob/master/cloud/notebooks/python_sdk/deployments/spark/cars-4-you/Use Spark to recommend mitigation for car rental company.ipynb
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Use Spark to recommend mitigation for car rental company with ibm-watsonx-ai
This notebook contains steps and code to create a predictive model, and deploy it on WML. This notebook introduces commands for pipeline creation, model training, model persistance to watsonx.ai Runtime repository, model deployment, and scoring.
Some familiarity with Python is helpful. This notebook uses Python 3.11 and Apache® Spark 3.4
You will use car_rental_training dataset.
Learning goals
The learning goals of this notebook are:
Load a CSV file into an Apache® Spark DataFrame.
Explore data.
Prepare data for training and evaluation.
Create an Apache® Spark machine learning pipeline.
Train and evaluate a model.
Persist a pipeline and model in watsonx.ai Runtime repository.
Deploy a model for online scoring using Wastson Machine Learning API.
Score sample scoring data using the watsonx.ai API.
Contents
This notebook contains the following parts:
Note: This notebook works correctly with kernel Python 3.11 with Spark 3.4
, please do not change kernel.
1. Set up the environment
Before you use the sample code in this notebook, you must perform the following setup tasks:
Create a watsonx.ai Runtime Service instance (a free plan is offered and information about how to create the instance can be found here).
Install and import the ibm-watsonx-ai
and dependecies
Note: ibm-watsonx-ai
documentation can be found here.
Connection to watsonx.ai Runtime
Authenticate the watsonx.ai Runtime service on IBM Cloud. You need to provide platform api_key
and instance location
.
You can use IBM Cloud CLI to retrieve platform API Key and instance location.
API Key can be generated in the following way:
In result, get the value of api_key
from the output.
Location of your watsonx.ai Runtime instance can be retrieved in the following way:
In result, get the value of location
from the output.
Tip: Your Cloud API key
can be generated by going to the Users section of the Cloud console. From that page, click your name, scroll down to the API Keys section, and click Create an IBM Cloud API key. Give your key a name and click Create, then copy the created key and paste it below. You can also get a service specific url by going to the Endpoint URLs section of the watsonx.ai Runtime docs. You can check your instance location in your watsonx.ai Runtime Service instance details.
You can also get service specific apikey by going to the Service IDs section of the Cloud Console. From that page, click Create, then copy the created key and paste it below.
Action: Enter your api_key
and location
in the following cell.
Working with spaces
First of all, you need to create a space that will be used for your work. If you do not have space already created, you can use Deployment Spaces Dashboard to create one.
Click New Deployment Space
Create an empty space
Select Cloud Object Storage
Select watsonx.ai Runtime instance and press Create
Copy
space_id
and paste it below
Tip: You can also use SDK to prepare the space for your work. More information can be found here.
Action: Assign space ID below
You can use list
method to print all existing spaces.
To be able to interact with all resources available in watsonx.ai Runtime, you need to set space which you will be using.
Note: Please restart the kernel (Kernel -> Restart)
Test Spark
In this section you will load the data as an Apache Spark DataFrame and perform a basic exploration.
Read data into Spark DataFrame from DB2 database and show sample record.
Load data
Explore data
As you can see, the data contains eleven fields. Action
field is the one you would like to predict using feedback data in Customer_Service
field.
As you can see, the data set contains 486 records.
3. Create an Apache Spark machine learning model
In this section you will learn how to:
In this section you will create an Apache Spark machine learning pipeline and then train the model.
In the following step, use the StringIndexer transformer to convert all the string fields to numeric ones.
In this section you will learn how to store your pipeline and model in watsonx.ai Runtime repository by using python client libraries.
Note: Apache® Spark 3.4 is required.
Save training data in your Cloud Object Storage
ibm-cos-sdk library allows Python developers to manage Cloud Object Storage (COS).
Action: Put credentials from Object Storage Service in Bluemix here.
Action: Define the service endpoint we will use.
Tip: You can find this information in Endpoints section of your Cloud Object Storage intance's dashbord.
You also need IBM Cloud authorization endpoint to be able to create COS resource object.
We create COS resource to be able to write data to Cloud Object Storage.
Now you will create bucket in COS and copy training dataset
for model from car_rental_training_data.csv.
Create connections to a COS bucket
Note: The above connection can be initialized alternatively with api_key
and resource_instance_id
.
The above cell can be replaced with:
Get saved model metadata from watsonx.ai Runtime.
Model Id can be used to retrive latest model version from watsonx.ai Runtime instance.
Below you can see stored model details.
You can use following command to create online deployment in cloud.
If you want to clean up all created assets:
experiments
trainings
pipelines
model definitions
models
functions
deployments
please follow up this sample notebook.
You successfully completed this notebook! You learned how to use Apache Spark machine learning as well as watsonx.ai Runtime for model creation and deployment. Check out our Online Documentation for more samples, tutorials, documentation, how-tos, and blog posts.
Authors
Amadeusz Masny, Python Software Developer at watsonx.ai
Mateusz Szewczyk, Software Engineer at watsonx.ai
Copyright © 2020-2025 IBM. This notebook and its source code are released under the terms of the MIT License.