Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By : Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK
Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By: Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK

Overview of this book

Processing big data in real time is challenging due to scalability, information inconsistency, and fault tolerance. Big Data Analysis with Python teaches you how to use tools that can control this data avalanche for you. With this book, you'll learn practical techniques to aggregate data into useful dimensions for posterior analysis, extract statistical measurements, and transform datasets into features for other systems. The book begins with an introduction to data manipulation in Python using pandas. You'll then get familiar with statistical analysis and plotting techniques. With multiple hands-on activities in store, you'll be able to analyze data that is distributed on several computers by using Dask. As you progress, you'll study how to aggregate data for plots when the entire data cannot be accommodated in memory. You'll also explore Hadoop (HDFS and YARN), which will help you tackle larger datasets. The book also covers Spark and explains how it interacts with other tools. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bootstrap your own Python environment, process large files, and manipulate data to generate statistics, metrics, and graphs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Big Data Analysis with Python
Preface

Data Manipulation with Spark DataFrames


Data manipulation is a prerequisite for any data analysis. To draw meaningful insights from the data, we first need to understand, process, and massage the data. But this step becomes particularly hard with the increase in the size of data. Due to the scale of data, even simple operations such as filtering and sorting become complex coding problems. Spark DataFrames make data manipulation on big data a piece of cake.

Manipulating the data in Spark DataFrames is quite like working on regular pandas DataFrames. Most of the data manipulation operations on Spark DataFrames can be done using simple and intuitive one-liners. We will use the Spark DataFrame containing the Iris dataset that we created in previous exercises for these data manipulation exercises.

Exercise 29: Selecting and Renaming Columns from the DataFrame

In this exercise, we will first rename the column using the withColumnRenamed method and then select and print the schema using the select...