Book Image

Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints

By : Alex Liu
Book Image

Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints

By: Alex Liu

Overview of this book

There's a reason why Apache Spark has become one of the most popular tools in Machine Learning – its ability to handle huge datasets at an impressive speed means you can be much more responsive to the data at your disposal. This book shows you Spark at its very best, demonstrating how to connect it with R and unlock maximum value not only from the tool but also from your data. Packed with a range of project "blueprints" that demonstrate some of the most interesting challenges that Spark can help you tackle, you'll find out how to use Spark notebooks and access, clean, and join different datasets before putting your knowledge into practice with some real-world projects, in which you will see how Spark Machine Learning can help you with everything from fraud detection to analyzing customer attrition. You'll also find out how to build a recommendation engine using Spark's parallel computing powers.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Feature extraction


In this section, we will turn our focus to feature extraction, which is to develop new features or variables from the available features or information of working datasets. At the same time, we will discuss some of Apache Spark's special capabilities for feature extraction as well as some related feature solutions made easy with Spark.

After this section, we will be able to develop and organize features for various machine learning projects.

Feature development challenges

For most big data machine learning projects, with many big datasets, we often cannot use them immediately. For example, when we take in some web log data, it is very messy and often in a form such as a collection of random text, from which we need to extract useful information and draw out useful features ready for machine learning. For example, we need to extract number of clicks and number of impressions out from web log data, for which many text mining tools and algorithms are ready to be used.

With any...