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

Jaccard similarity for large sets with MinHash

The Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure to determine whether an item is a member of a set. While comparing user or item similarities, what we are usually interested in is the intersection between sets, as opposed to their precise contents. MinHash is a technique that enables a large set to be compressed in such a way that we can still perform the Jaccard similarity on the compressed representations.

Let's see how it works with a reference to two of the most prolific raters in the MovieLens dataset. Users 405 and 655 have rated 727 and 675 movies respectively. In the following code, we extract their ratings and convert them into sets before passing to Incanter's jaccard-index function. Recall that this returns the ratio of movies they've both rated out of all the movies they've rated:

(defn rated-items [user-ratings id]
  (->> (get user-ratings id)
       (map :item)))

(defn ex-7-22 []
  (let [ratings    ...