## Context Machine Learning with R by Brett Lantz is a book that provides an introduction to machine learning using R. As far as I can tell, Packt Publishing does not make its datasets available online unless you buy the book and create a user account which can be a problem if you are checking the book out from the library or borrowing the book from a friend. All of these datasets are in the public domain but simply needed some cleaning up and recoding to match the format in the book. ## Content **Columns** - age: age of primary beneficiary - sex: insurance contractor gender, female, male - bmi: Body mass index, providing an understanding of body, weights that are relatively high or low relative to height, objective index of body weight (kg / m ^ 2) using the ratio of height to weight, ideally 18.5 to 24.9 - children: Number of children covered by health insurance / Number of dependents - smoker: Smoking - region: the beneficiary's residential area in the US, northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest. - charges: Individual medical costs billed by health insurance ## Acknowledgements The dataset is available on GitHub [here](https://github.com/stedy/Machine-Learning-with-R-datasets). ## Inspiration Can you accurately predict insurance costs?