Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By : Ivan Idris
Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By: Ivan Idris

Overview of this book

Data analysis is a rapidly evolving field and Python is a multi-paradigm programming language suitable for object-oriented application development and functional design patterns. As Python offers a range of tools and libraries for all purposes, it has slowly evolved as the primary language for data science, including topics on: data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Python Data Analysis Cookbook focuses on reproducibility and creating production-ready systems. You will start with recipes that set the foundation for data analysis with libraries such as matplotlib, NumPy, and pandas. You will learn to create visualizations by choosing color maps and palettes then dive into statistical data analysis using distribution algorithms and correlations. You’ll then help you find your way around different data and numerical problems, get to grips with Spark and HDFS, and then set up migration scripts for web mining. In this book, you will dive deeper into recipes on spectral analysis, smoothing, and bootstrapping methods. Moving on, you will learn to rank stocks and check market efficiency, then work with metrics and clusters. You will achieve parallelism to improve system performance by using multiple threads and speeding up your code. By the end of the book, you will be capable of handling various data analysis techniques in Python and devising solutions for problem scenarios.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Python Data Analysis Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Glossary
Index

Setting up Spark


Apache Spark is a project in the Hadoop ecosystem (refer to the Using HDFS recipe), which purportedly performs better than Hadoop's MapReduce. Spark loads data into memory as much as possible, and it has good support for machine learning. In the Clustering data with Spark recipe, we will apply a machine learning algorithm via Spark.

Spark can work standalone, but it is designed to work with Hadoop using HDFS. Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) are the central structure in Spark, and they represent distributed data. Spark has good support for Scala, which is a JVM language, and a somewhat lagging support for Python. For instance, the support to stream in the pyspark API lags a bit. Spark also has the concept of DataFrames, but it is not implemented through pandas, but through a Spark implementation.

Getting ready

Download Spark from the downloads page at https://spark.apache.org/downloads.html (retrieved September 2015). I downloaded the spark-1.5.0-bin-hadoop2.6.tgz archive...