Book Image

Mastering Spark for Data Science

By : Bifet, Morgan, Amend, Hallett, George
Book Image

Mastering Spark for Data Science

By: Bifet, Morgan, Amend, Hallett, George

Overview of this book

Data science seeks to transform the world using data, and this is typically achieved through disrupting and changing real processes in real industries. In order to operate at this level you need to build data science solutions of substance –solutions that solve real problems. Spark has emerged as the big data platform of choice for data scientists due to its speed, scalability, and easy-to-use APIs. This book deep dives into using Spark to deliver production-grade data science solutions. This process is demonstrated by exploring the construction of a sophisticated global news analysis service that uses Spark to generate continuous geopolitical and current affairs insights.You will learn all about the core Spark APIs and take a comprehensive tour of advanced libraries, including Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, MLlib, and more. You will be introduced to advanced techniques and methods that will help you to construct commercial-grade data products. Focusing on a sequence of tutorials that deliver a working news intelligence service, you will learn about advanced Spark architectures, how to work with geographic data in Spark, and how to tune Spark algorithms so they scale linearly.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

GDELT and oil

The premise of this chapter is that we can manipulate GDELT data to determine, to a greater or lesser extent, the price of oil based on historic events. The accuracy of our predictor will depend on many variables including the detail of our events, the number used and our hypotheses surrounding the nature of the relationship between oil and these events.

The oil industry is very complex and is driven by many factors. It has been found however, that most major oil price fluctuations are largely explained by shifts in the demand of crude oil. The price also increases during times of greater demand for stock, and historically has been high in times of geopolitical tension in the Middle East. In particular, political events have a strong influence on the oil price and it is this aspect that we will concentrate on.

Crude oil is produced by many countries around the world; there are however, three main benchmarks that are used by producers for pricing:

  • Brent: Produced by various entities...