Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By : Rishi Yadav
Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By: Rishi Yadav

Overview of this book

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data. Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark. Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Introduction


The following is Wikipedia's definition of recommender systems:

"Recommender systems are a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the rating or preference that user would give to an item."

Recommender systems have gained immense popularity in recent years. Amazon uses them to recommend books, Netflix for movies, and Google News to recommend news stories. As the proof is in the pudding, here are some examples of the impact recommendations can have (source: Celma, Lamere, 2008):

  • Two-thirds of the movies watched on Netflix are recommended
  • 38 % of the news clicks on Google News are recommended
  • 35 % of the sales at Amazon sales are the result of recommendations

As we saw in the previous chapters, features and feature selection play a major role in the efficacy of machine learning algorithms. Recommender engine algorithms discover these features, called latent features, automatically. In short, there are latent features responsible for a user to like one movie and...