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

Defining a Business Problem


A business problem in data science is a long-term or short-term challenge faced by a business entity that can prevent business goals being achieved and act as a constraint for growth and sustainability that can otherwise be prevented through an efficient data-driven decision system. Some typical data science business problems are predicting the demand for consumer products in the coming week, optimizing logistic operations for third-party logistics (3PL), and identifying fraudulent transactions in insurance claims.

Data science and machine learning are not magical technologies that can solve these business problems by just ingesting data into pre-built algorithms. They are complex in terms of the approach and design needed to create end-to-end analytics projects.

When a business needs such solutions, you may end up in a situation that forms a requirement gap if a clear understanding of the final objective is not set in place. A strong foundation to this starts with...