Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Centroid-based clustering (CC)

In this section, we discuss the centroid-based clustering technique and its computational challenges. An example of using K-means with Spark MLlib will be shown for a better understanding of the centroid-based clustering.

Challenges in CC algorithm

As discussed previously, in a centroid-based clustering algorithm like K-means, setting the optimal value of the number of clusters K is an optimization problem. This problem can be described as NP-hard (that is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) featuring high algorithmic complexities, and thus the common approach is trying to achieve only an approximate solution. Consequently, solving these optimization problems imposes an extra burden and consequently...