Using Microsoft R Server on a single machine for experiments with 600 million taxi rides.

The New York City taxi dataset is one of the largest publicly available datasets. It has about 1.1 billion taxi rides in New York City. Previously this dataset was explored and visualized in a number of blog posts, where the authors used various technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL and Apache Elastic Search). Moreoever, in a recent blog post our colleagues showed how to build machine learning models over one year of this dataset using Microsoft R Server (MRS) running in a 4-node Hadoop cluster. In this blog post we will use a single commodity machine to show an end-to-end process of downloading and cleaning 4 years of data, as well building and evaluating a machine learning model.