Book Image

Mastering Java for Data Science

By : Alexey Grigorev
Book Image

Mastering Java for Data Science

By: Alexey Grigorev

Overview of this book

Java is the most popular programming language, according to the TIOBE index, and it is a typical choice for running production systems in many companies, both in the startup world and among large enterprises. Not surprisingly, it is also a common choice for creating data science applications: it is fast and has a great set of data processing tools, both built-in and external. What is more, choosing Java for data science allows you to easily integrate solutions with existing software, and bring data science into production with less effort. This book will teach you how to create data science applications with Java. First, we will revise the most important things when starting a data science application, and then brush up the basics of Java and machine learning before diving into more advanced topics. We start by going over the existing libraries for data processing and libraries with machine learning algorithms. After that, we cover topics such as classification and regression, dimensionality reduction and clustering, information retrieval and natural language processing, and deep learning and big data. Finally, we finish the book by talking about the ways to deploy the model and evaluate it in production settings.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis in Java

Java is a statically typed programming language and code written in Java needs compiling. While Java is good for developing complex data science applications, it makes it harder to interactively explore the data; every time, we need to recompile the source code and re-run the analysis script to see the results. This means that, if we need to read some data, we will have to do it over and over again. If the dataset is large, the program takes more time to start.

So it is hard to interact with data and this makes EDA more difficult in Java than in other languages. In particular, Read-Evaluate-Print Loop (REPL), an interactive shell, is quite an important feature for doing EDA.

Unfortunately, Java 8 does not have REPL, but there are several alternatives:

  • Other interactive JVM languages such as JavaScript, Groovy, or Scala
  • Java 9 with jshell
  • Completely alternative...