Book Image

Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints

By : Alex Liu
Book Image

Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints

By: Alex Liu

Overview of this book

There's a reason why Apache Spark has become one of the most popular tools in Machine Learning – its ability to handle huge datasets at an impressive speed means you can be much more responsive to the data at your disposal. This book shows you Spark at its very best, demonstrating how to connect it with R and unlock maximum value not only from the tool but also from your data. Packed with a range of project "blueprints" that demonstrate some of the most interesting challenges that Spark can help you tackle, you'll find out how to use Spark notebooks and access, clean, and join different datasets before putting your knowledge into practice with some real-world projects, in which you will see how Spark Machine Learning can help you with everything from fraud detection to analyzing customer attrition. You'll also find out how to build a recommendation engine using Spark's parallel computing powers.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Spark computing for machine learning


With its innovations on RDD and in-memory processing, Apache Spark has truly made distributed computing easily accessible to data scientists and machine learning professionals. According to the Apache Spark team, Apache Spark runs on the Mesos cluster manager, letting it share resources with Hadoop and other applications. Therefore, Apache Spark can read from any Hadoop input source like HDFS.

For the above, the Apache Spark computing model is very suitable to distributed computing for machine learning. Especially for rapid interactive machine learning, parallel computing, and complicated modelling at scale, Apache Spark should definitely be utilized.

According to the Spark development team, Spark's philosophy is to make life easy and productive for data scientists and machine learning professionals. Due to this, Apache Spark has:

  • Well documented, expressive API's

  • Powerful domain specific libraries

  • Easy integration with storage systems

  • Caching to avoid data movement

Per the introduction by Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks, Spark is especially made for large scale data processing. Apache Spark supports agile data science to iterate rapidly, and Spark can be integrated with IBM and other solutions easily.