Book Image

Practical Big Data Analytics

By : Nataraj Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Big Data Analytics

By: Nataraj Dasgupta

Overview of this book

Big Data analytics relates to the strategies used by organizations to collect, organize, and analyze large amounts of data to uncover valuable business insights that cannot be analyzed through traditional systems. Crafting an enterprise-scale cost-efficient Big Data and machine learning solution to uncover insights and value from your organization’s data is a challenge. Today, with hundreds of new Big Data systems, machine learning packages, and BI tools, selecting the right combination of technologies is an even greater challenge. This book will help you do that. With the help of this guide, you will be able to bridge the gap between the theoretical world of technology and the practical reality of building corporate Big Data and data science platforms. You will get hands-on exposure to Hadoop and Spark, build machine learning dashboards using R and R Shiny, create web-based apps using NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and even learn how to write R code for neural networks. By the end of the book, you will have a very clear and concrete understanding of what Big Data analytics means, how it drives revenues for organizations, and how you can develop your own Big Data analytics solution using the different tools and methods articulated in this book.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

Summary


This chapter introduced some of the key tools used for data science. In particular, it demonstrated how to download and install the virtual machine for the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop (CDH), Spark, R, RStudio, and Python. Although the user can download the source code of Hadoop and install it on, say, a Unix system, it is usually fraught with issues and requires a fair amount of debugging. Using a VM instead allows the user to begin using and learning Hadoop with minimal effort as it is a complete preconfigured environment.

Additionally, R and Python are the two most commonly used languages for machine learning and in general, analytics. They are available for all popular operating systems. Although they can be installed in the VM, the user is encouraged to try and install them on their local machines (laptop/workstation) if feasible as it will have relatively higher performance.

In the next chapter, we will dive deeper into the details of Hadoop and its core components and concepts...