Book Image

Learning PySpark

By : Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee
Book Image

Learning PySpark

By: Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source framework for efficient cluster computing with a strong interface for data parallelism and fault tolerance. This book will show you how to leverage the power of Python and put it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You will start by getting a firm understanding of the Spark 2.0 architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You will get familiar with the modules available in PySpark. You will learn how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. Also, you will get a thorough overview of machine learning capabilities of PySpark using ML and MLlib, graph processing using GraphFrames, and polyglot persistence using Blaze. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will have established a firm understanding of the Spark Python API and how it can be used to build data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning PySpark
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Preparing your flights dataset


For this flights sample scenario, we will make use of two sets of data:

  • Airline On-Time Performance and Causes of Flight Delays: [http://bit.ly/2ccJPPM] This dataset contains scheduled and actual departure and arrival times, and delay causes as reported by US air carriers. The data is collected by the Office of Airline Information, Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).

  • Open Flights: Airports and airline data: [http://openflights.org/data.html] This dataset contains the list of US airport data including the IATA code, airport name, and airport location.

We will create two DataFrames – airports and departureDelays–which will make up our vertices and edges of our GraphFrame, respectively. We will be creating this flights sample application using Python.

As we are using a Databricks notebook for our example, we can make use of the /databricks-datasets/location, which contains numerous sample datasets. You can also download the data from:

  • depa rtureDelays.csv...