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 for a holistic view


Spark is very suitable for machine learning projects, such as obtaining a holistic view of business, as it enables us to process huge amounts of data fast and code complicated computations easily. In this section, we will first describe a real business case and then how to prepare Spark computing for our project.

The use case

The company IFS sells and distributes thousands of IT products and has a lot of data on marketing, training, team management, promotion, and products. The company wants to understand how various kinds of actions, such as those in marketing and training, affect the sales team's success. In other words, IFS is interested in finding out how much impact marketing, training, or promotion generates separately.

In the past, IFS has done a lot of analytical work, but all of it was completed by individual departments on soloed datasets. That is, they have analytical results about how marketing affects sales from using marketing data alone and how training...