Book Image

Machine Learning with Spark

By : Nick Pentreath
Book Image

Machine Learning with Spark

By: Nick Pentreath

Overview of this book

<p>Apache Spark is a framework for distributed computing that is designed from the ground up to be optimized for low latency tasks and in-memory data storage. It is one of the few frameworks for parallel computing that combines speed, scalability, in-memory processing, and fault tolerance with ease of programming and a flexible, expressive, and powerful API design.</p> <p>This book guides you through the basics of Spark's API used to load and process data and prepare the data to use as input to the various machine learning models. There are detailed examples and real-world use cases for you to explore common machine learning models including recommender systems, classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. You will cover advanced topics such as working with large-scale text data, and methods for online machine learning and model evaluation using Spark Streaming.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Machine Learning with Spark
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Accessing publicly available datasets


Fortunately, while commercially-sensitive data can be hard to come by, there are still a number of useful datasets available publicly. Many of these are often used as benchmark datasets for specific types of machine learning problems. Examples of common data sources include:

  • UCI Machine Learning Repository: This is a collection of almost 300 datasets of various types and sizes for tasks including classification, regression, clustering, and recommender systems. The list is available at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/.

  • Amazon AWS public datasets: This is a set of often very large datasets that can be accessed via Amazon S3. These datasets include the Human Genome Project, the Common Crawl web corpus, Wikipedia data, and Google Books Ngrams. Information on these datasets can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/.

  • Kaggle: This is a collection of datasets used in machine learning competitions run by Kaggle. Areas include classification, regression...