Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Feature extraction and transformation

Suppose you are going to build a machine learning model that will predict whether a credit card transaction is fraudulent or not. Now, based on the available background knowledge and data analysis, you might decide which data fields (aka features) are important for training your model. For example, amount, customer name, buying company name, and the address of the credit card owners are worth to providing for the overall learning process. These are important to consider since, if you just provide a randomly generated transaction ID, that will not carry any information so would not be useful at all. Thus, once you have decided which features to include in your training set, you then need to transform those features to train the model for better learning. The feature transformations help you add additional background information to the training...