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

Data exploration


Now that we have a clean data frame with relevant data and the initial hypothesis, it is time to really explore what we have. The DataFrames abstraction provides functions such as group by out of the box for you to look around. You may register the cleaned data frame as a table and run the time-tested SQL statements to do just the same.

This is also the time to plot a few graphs. This phase of visualization is the exploratory analysis mentioned in the data visualization chapter. The objectives of this exploration are greatly influenced by the initial information you garner from the business stakeholders and the hypothesis. In other words, your discussions with the stakeholders help you know what to look for.

There are some general guidelines that are applicable for almost all data science assignments, but again subjective to different use cases. Let us look at some generic ones:

  • Look for missing data and treat it. We have already discussed various ways to do this in Chapter...