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

Data analytics life cycle


For most real-world projects, there is some defined sequence of steps to be followed. However, there are no universally agreed upon definitions or boundaries for data analytics and data science. Generally, the term "data analytics" encompasses the techniques and processes involved in examining data, discovering useful insights, and communicating them. The term "data science" can be best treated as an interdisciplinary field drawing from statistics, computer science, and mathematics. Both terms deal with processing raw data to derive knowledge or insights, usually in an iterative fashion, and some people use them interchangeably.

Based on diverse business requirements, there are different ways of approaching problems but there is no unique standard process that fits in well with all possible scenarios. A typical process workflow can be summarized as a cycle of formulating a question, exploring, hypothesizing, validating the hypothesis, analyzing the results, and starting...