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 5. Introducing MLlib

In the previous chapter, we learned how to prepare the data for modeling. In this chapter, we will actually use some of that learning to build a classification model using the MLlib package of PySpark.

MLlib stands for Machine Learning Library. Even though MLlib is now in a maintenance mode, that is, it is not actively being developed (and will most likely be deprecated later), it is warranted that we cover at least some of the features of the library. In addition, MLlib is currently the only library that supports training models for streaming.

Note

Starting with Spark 2.0, ML is the main machine learning library that operates on DataFrames instead of RDDs as is the case for MLlib.

The documentation for MLlib can be found here: http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/api/python/pyspark.mllib.html.

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

  • Prepare the data for modeling with MLlib

  • Perform statistical testing

  • Predict survival chances of infants using logistic...