Importance of Web Scraping as a Data Source for Machine Learning Algorithms - Review

Abstract

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that trains a machine to think as humans. Machine learning algorithms need large amounts of data for high-value predictions which helps to get better decisions in real-time environment with minimal human intervention. Machine Learning inherently requires data, but collecting data is very tedious and time-consuming task. Web Scraping is the technique which aims to address this issue. Web scraping or web data extraction used for extracting unstructured data from websites and transform into structured data and stored in a central local database or spreadsheet for future retrieval or analysis. In this review, we discuss the importance of web scraping as a data source for machine learning algorithms.