Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By : Pascal Bugnion
Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By: Pascal Bugnion

Overview of this book

Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language (it supports both object-oriented and functional programming) and scripting language used to build applications for the JVM. Languages such as R, Python, Java, and so on are mostly used for data science. It is particularly good at analyzing large sets of data without any significant impact on performance and thus Scala is being adopted by many developers and data scientists. Data scientists might be aware that building applications that are truly scalable is hard. Scala, with its powerful functional libraries for interacting with databases and building scalable frameworks will give you the tools to construct robust data pipelines. This book will introduce you to the libraries for ingesting, storing, manipulating, processing, and visualizing data in Scala. Packed with real-world examples and interesting data sets, this book will teach you to ingest data from flat files and web APIs and store it in a SQL or NoSQL database. It will show you how to design scalable architectures to process and modelling your data, starting from simple concurrency constructs such as parallel collections and futures, through to actor systems and Apache Spark. As well as Scala’s emphasis on functional structures and immutability, you will learn how to use the right parallel construct for the job at hand, minimizing development time without compromising scalability. Finally, you will learn how to build beautiful interactive visualizations using web frameworks. This book gives tutorials on some of the most common Scala libraries for data science, allowing you to quickly get up to speed with building data science and data engineering solutions.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Scala for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Custom functions on DataFrames


So far, we have only used built-in functions to operate on DataFrame columns. While these are often sufficient, we sometimes need greater flexibility. Spark lets us apply custom transformations to every row through user-defined functions (UDFs). Let's assume that we want to use the equation that we derived in Chapter 2, Manipulating Data with Breeze, for the probability of a person being male, given their height and weight. We calculated that the decision boundary was given by:

Any person with f > 0 is more likely to be male than female, given their height and weight and the training set used for Chapter 2, Manipulating Data with Breeze (which was based on students, so is unlikely to be representative of the population as a whole). To convert from a height in centimeters to the normalized height, rescaledHeight, we can use this formula:

Similarly, to convert a weight (in kilograms) to the normalized weight, rescaledWeight, we can use:

The average and standard...