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 preparation


Data quality has always been a pervasive problem in the industry. The presence of incorrect or inconsistent data can produce misleading results of your analysis. Implementing better algorithm or building better models will not help much if the data is not cleansed and prepared well, as per the requirement. There is an industry jargon called data engineering that refers to data sourcing and preparation. This is typically done by data scientists and in a few organizations, there is a dedicated team for this purpose. However, while preparing data, a scientific perspective is often needed to do it right. As an example, you may not just do mean substitution to treat missing values and look into data distribution to find more appropriate values to substitute. Another such example is that you may not just look at a box plot or scatter plot to look for outliers, as there could be multivariate outliers which are not visible if you plot a single variable. There are different approaches...