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

Spark development status


Apache Spark has become the most currently active project in the Hadoop ecosystem in terms of the number of contributors by the end of 2015. Having started as a research project at UC Berkeley AMPLAB in 2009, Spark is still relatively young when compared to projects such as Apache Hadoop and is still in active development. There were three releases in the year 2015, from 1.3 through 1.5, packed with features such as DataFrames API, SparkR, and Project Tungsten respectively. Version 1.6 was released in early 2016 and included the new Dataset API and expansion of data science functionality. Spark 2.0 was released in July 2016, and this being a major release has a lot of new features and enhancements that deserve a section of their own.

Spark 2.0's features and enhancements

Apache Spark 2.0 included three major new features and several other performance improvements and under-the-hood changes. This section attempts to give a high-level overview yet step into the details...