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

Feature preparation


In section, Feature extraction of Chapter 2, Data Preparation for Spark ML, we have reviewed a few methods for feature extraction and discussed their implementation in Apache Spark. All the techniques discussed there can be applied to our data here, especially the ones for utilizing time series and feature comparison to create new features. For example, the customer satisfaction response change over time is considered as possibly an excellent predictor.

For this project, we will need to conduct both feature extraction and feature selection, which will allow us to utilize all the techniques discussed in Chapter 2, Data Preparation for Spark ML and also Chapter 3, A Holistic View on Spark.

The data merging part is also necessary, but its implementation is similar to what was described in the previous chapters, to be completed at ease.

Feature extraction

In the previous chapters, we used Spark SQL and R for feature extraction and, for this real-life project, we will try to use...