Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By : Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal
Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By: Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal

Overview of this book

This is the era of Big Data. The words ‘Big Data’ implies big innovation and enables a competitive advantage for businesses. Apache Spark was designed to perform Big Data analytics at scale, and so Spark is equipped with the necessary algorithms and supports multiple programming languages. Whether you are a technologist, a data scientist, or a beginner to Big Data analytics, this book will provide you with all the skills necessary to perform statistical data analysis, data visualization, predictive modeling, and build scalable data products or solutions using Python, Scala, and R. With ample case studies and real-world examples, Spark for Data Science will help you ensure the successful execution of your data science projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Spark for Data Science
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we briefly covered what big data is all about. We then discussed the computational and analytical challenges involved in big data analytics. Later, we looked at how the analytics space in the context of big data has evolved over a period of time and what the trend has been. We also covered how Spark addressed most of the big data analytics challenges and became a general-purpose unified analytics platform for data science as well as parallel computation. At the end of this chapter, we just gave you a heads-up on the Spark stack and its components.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the Spark programming model. We will take a deep dive into the basic building block of Spark, which is the RDD. Also, we will learn how to program with the RDD API on Scala and Python.