Book Image

Learning PySpark

By : Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee
Book Image

Learning PySpark

By: Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source framework for efficient cluster computing with a strong interface for data parallelism and fault tolerance. This book will show you how to leverage the power of Python and put it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You will start by getting a firm understanding of the Spark 2.0 architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You will get familiar with the modules available in PySpark. You will learn how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. Also, you will get a thorough overview of machine learning capabilities of PySpark using ML and MLlib, graph processing using GraphFrames, and polyglot persistence using Blaze. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will have established a firm understanding of the Spark Python API and how it can be used to build data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning PySpark
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Prepare Data for Modeling

All data is dirty, irrespective of what the source of the data might lead you to believe: it might be your colleague, a telemetry system that monitors your environment, a dataset you download from the web, or some other source. Until you have tested and proven to yourself that your data is in a clean state (we will get to what clean state means in a second), you should neither trust it nor use it for modeling.

Your data can be stained with duplicates, missing observations and outliers, non-existent addresses, wrong phone numbers and area codes, inaccurate geographical coordinates, wrong dates, incorrect labels, mixtures of upper and lower cases, trailing spaces, and many other more subtle problems. It is your job to clean it, irrespective of whether you are a data scientist or data engineer, so you can build a statistical or machine learning model.

Your dataset is considered technically clean if none of the aforementioned problems can be found. However...