Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By : Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal
Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By: Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal

Overview of this book

This is the era of Big Data. The words ‘Big Data’ implies big innovation and enables a competitive advantage for businesses. Apache Spark was designed to perform Big Data analytics at scale, and so Spark is equipped with the necessary algorithms and supports multiple programming languages. Whether you are a technologist, a data scientist, or a beginner to Big Data analytics, this book will provide you with all the skills necessary to perform statistical data analysis, data visualization, predictive modeling, and build scalable data products or solutions using Python, Scala, and R. With ample case studies and real-world examples, Spark for Data Science will help you ensure the successful execution of your data science projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Spark for Data Science
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introducing a case study


We will be exploring Academy Awards demographics in this chapter. You can download the data from the GitHub repository at https://www.crowdflower.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Oscars-demographics-DFE.csv.

This dataset is based on the data provided at http://www.crowdflower.com/data-for-everyone. It contains demographic details such as race, birthplace, and age. Rows are around 400 and it can be easily processed on a simple home computer, so you can do a Proof of Concept (POC) on executing a data science project on Spark.

Just start by downloading the file and inspecting the data. The data may look fine but as you take a closer look, you will notice that it is not "clean". For example, the date of birth column does not follow the same format. Some years are in two-digit format whereas some are in four-digit format. Birthplace does not have country for locations within the USA.

Likewise, you will also notice that the data looks skewed, with more "white" race people from...