Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By : Garner
Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By: Garner

Overview of this book

The term “data science” has been widely used to define this new profession that is expected to interpret vast datasets and translate them to improved decision-making and performance. Clojure is a powerful language that combines the interactivity of a scripting language with the speed of a compiled language. Together with its rich ecosystem of native libraries and an extremely simple and consistent functional approach to data manipulation, which maps closely to mathematical formula, it is an ideal, practical, and flexible language to meet a data scientist’s diverse needs. Taking you on a journey from simple summary statistics to sophisticated machine learning algorithms, this book shows how the Clojure programming language can be used to derive insights from data. Data scientists often forge a novel path, and you’ll see how to make use of Clojure’s Java interoperability capabilities to access libraries such as Mahout and Mllib for which Clojure wrappers don’t yet exist. Even seasoned Clojure developers will develop a deeper appreciation for their language’s flexibility! You’ll learn how to apply statistical thinking to your own data and use Clojure to explore, analyze, and visualize it in a technically and statistically robust way. You can also use Incanter for local data processing and ClojureScript to present interactive visualisations and understand how distributed platforms such as Hadoop sand Spark’s MapReduce and GraphX’s BSP solve the challenges of data analysis at scale, and how to explain algorithms using those programming models. Above all, by following the explanations in this book, you’ll learn not just how to be effective using the current state-of-the-art methods in data science, but why such methods work so that you can continue to be productive as the field evolves into the future.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

State and Reagent


State in ClojureScript is managed in the same way as Clojure applications—through the use of atoms, refs, or agents. Atoms provide uncoordinated, synchronous access to a single identity and are an excellent choice for storing the application state. Using an atom ensures that the application always sees a single, consistent view of the data.

Reagent is a ClojureScript library that provides a mechanism to update the content of a web page in response to changing the value of an atom. Markup and state are bound together, so that markup is regenerated whenever the application state is updated.

Reagent also provides syntax to render HTML in an idiomatic way using Clojure data structures. This means that both the content and the interactivity of the page can be handled in one language.

Updating state

With data held in a Reagent atom, updating the state is achieved by calling the swap! function with two arguments—the atom we wish to update and a function to transform the state of the...