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

The RDD API


The RDD is a read-only, partitioned, fault-tolerant collection of records. From a design perspective, there was a need for a single data structure abstraction that hides the complexity of dealing with a wide variety of data sources, be it HDFS, filesystems, RDBMS, NOSQL data structures, or any other data source. The user should be able to define the RDD from any of these sources. The goal was to support a wide array of operations and let users compose them in any order.

RDD basics

Each dataset is represented as an object in Spark's programming interface called RDD. Spark provides two ways for creating RDDs. One way is to parallelize an existing collection. The other way is to reference a dataset in an external storage system such as a filesystem.

An RDD is composed of one or more data sources, maybe after performing a series of transformations including several operators. Every RDD or RDD partition knows how to recreate itself in case of failure. It has the log of transformations...