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


In this chapter, we read about some of the core features of Spark, one of the most prominent technologies in the Big Data landscape today. Spark has matured rapidly since its inception in 2014, when it was released as a Big Data solution that alleviated many of the shortcomings of Hadoop, such as I/O contention and others.

Today, Spark has several components, including dedicated ones for streaming analytics and machine learning, and is being actively developed. Databricks is the leading provider of the commercially supported version of Spark and also hosts a very convenient cloud-based Spark environment with limited resources that any user can access at no charge. This has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry as users do not need to install a complete Spark environment to learn and use the platform.

In the next chapter, we will begin our discussion on machine learning. Most of the text, until this section, has focused on the management of large scale data. Making use of the data...