Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By : Pascal Bugnion
Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By: Pascal Bugnion

Overview of this book

Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language (it supports both object-oriented and functional programming) and scripting language used to build applications for the JVM. Languages such as R, Python, Java, and so on are mostly used for data science. It is particularly good at analyzing large sets of data without any significant impact on performance and thus Scala is being adopted by many developers and data scientists. Data scientists might be aware that building applications that are truly scalable is hard. Scala, with its powerful functional libraries for interacting with databases and building scalable frameworks will give you the tools to construct robust data pipelines. This book will introduce you to the libraries for ingesting, storing, manipulating, processing, and visualizing data in Scala. Packed with real-world examples and interesting data sets, this book will teach you to ingest data from flat files and web APIs and store it in a SQL or NoSQL database. It will show you how to design scalable architectures to process and modelling your data, starting from simple concurrency constructs such as parallel collections and futures, through to actor systems and Apache Spark. As well as Scala’s emphasis on functional structures and immutability, you will learn how to use the right parallel construct for the job at hand, minimizing development time without compromising scalability. Finally, you will learn how to build beautiful interactive visualizations using web frameworks. This book gives tutorials on some of the most common Scala libraries for data science, allowing you to quickly get up to speed with building data science and data engineering solutions.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Scala for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

FEC data


In this chapter, we will use a somewhat more involved example dataset. The Federal Electoral Commission of the United States (FEC) records all donations to presidential candidates greater than $200. These records are publicly available. We will look at the donations for the campaign leading up to the 2012 general elections that resulted in Barack Obama's re-election. The data includes donations to the two presidential candidates, Obama and Romney, and also to the other contenders in the Republican primaries (there were no Democrat primaries).

In this chapter, we will take the transaction data provided by the FEC, store it in a table, and learn how to query and analyze it.

The first step is to acquire the data. If you have downloaded the code samples from the Packt website, you should already have two CSVs in the data directory of the code samples for this chapter. If not, you can download the files using the following links:

  • data.scala4datascience.com/fec/ohio.csv.gz (or ohio.csv...