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

Dataset joining


In this section, we will cover dataset joining techniques. We will also discuss some of Spark's special features for data joining plus some data joining solutions made easy with Spark.

After this section, we will be able to join data for various machine learning needs.

Dataset joining and its tool – the Spark SQL

In preparing datasets for a machine learning project, we often need to combine data from multiple datasets. For relational tables, the task is to join tables through a primary and foreign key relationship.

Joining two or more datasets together sounds easy, but can be very challenging and time consuming. In SQL, SELECT is the most frequently used command. As an example, the following is a typical SQL code to perform a join:

SELECT column1, column2, …
FROM table1, table2
WHERE table1.joincolumn = table2.joincolumn
AND search_condition(s);

To work with the table joining tasks mentioned before, data scientists and machine learning professionals often utilize their familiar...