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

Handling Missing Values in Spark DataFrames


Missing value handling is one of the complex areas of data science. There are a variety of techniques that are used to handle missing values depending on the type of missing data and the business use case at hand.

These methods range from simple logic-based methods to advanced statistical methods such as regression and KNN. However, irrespective of the method used to tackle the missing values, we will end up performing one of the following two operations on the missing value data:

  • Removing the records with missing values from the data

  • Imputing the missing value entries with some constant value

In this section, we will explore how to do both these operations with PySpark DataFrames.

Exercise 40: Removing Records with Missing Values from a DataFrame

In this exercise, we will remove the records containing missing value entries for the PySpark DataFrame. Let's perform the following steps:

  1. To remove the missing values from a particular column, use the following...