How to do it...

Perform the following steps to retrieve data for machine learning:

1. Access the UCI machine learning repository: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/.
2. Click on view all data sets. Here you will find a list of datasets containing field names, such as Name, Data Types, Default Task, Attribute Types, #Instances, #Attributes, and Year:
3. Use Ctrl + F to search for Iris:
4. Click on Iris. This will display the data folder and the dataset description:
5. Click on Data Folder, which will display a directory containing the iris dataset:

1. You can then either download iris.data or use the read.csv function to read the dataset:

        > iris.data = read.csv(url("http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-
        learning-databases/iris/iris.data"), header = FALSE,  col.names =
        c("Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width", "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width", 
        "Species"))
        > head(iris.data)
        Output:
        Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width   Species
        1         5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
        2         4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
        3         4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2 Iris-setosa
        4         4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2 Iris-setosa
        5         5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2 Iris-setosa
        6         5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4 Iris-setosa