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

Graphs in Spark


The ability to effectively visualize data is of paramount importance. Visual representations of data help the user develop a better understanding of data and uncover trends that might go unnoticed in text form. There are numerous types of plots available in Python, each with its own context.

We will be exploring some of these plots, including bar charts, density plots, boxplots, and linear plots for Spark DataFrames, using the widely used Python plotting packages of Matplotlib and Seaborn. The point to note here is that Spark deals with big data. So, make sure that your data size is reasonable enough (that is, it fits in your computer's RAM) before plotting it. This can be achieved by filtering, aggregating, or sampling the data before plotting it.

We are using the Iris dataset, which is small, hence we do not need to do any such pre-processing steps to reduce the data size.

Note

The user should install and load the Matplotlib and Seaborn packages beforehand, in the development...