Book Image

Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 - Third Edition

By : Holden Karau
Book Image

Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 - Third Edition

By: Holden Karau

Overview of this book

When people want a way to process big data at speed, Spark is invariably the solution. With its ease of development (in comparison to the relative complexity of Hadoop), it’s unsurprising that it’s becoming popular with data analysts and engineers everywhere. Beginning with the fundamentals, we’ll show you how to get set up with Spark with minimum fuss. You’ll then get to grips with some simple APIs before investigating machine learning and graph processing – throughout we’ll make sure you know exactly how to apply your knowledge. You will also learn how to use the Spark shell, how to load data before finding out how to build and run your own Spark applications. Discover how to manipulate your RDD and get stuck into a range of DataFrame APIs. As if that’s not enough, you’ll also learn some useful Machine Learning algorithms with the help of Spark MLlib and integrating Spark with R. We’ll also make sure you’re confident and prepared for graph processing, as you learn more about the GraphX API.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Case study - AlphaGo tweets analytics


Now that we have a good understanding of GraphX, let's apply our newly gained knowledge to analyze a retweet network. Like any big data project, the first task is to define a pipeline, figure out the data elements, the source, transformations, mapping, and processing.

Data pipeline

For this case study, I collected Twitter data pertaining to the AlphaGo project:

While the full mechanics of data collection from Twitter is out of scope, I will quickly mention the main steps:

  1. Using Python and the tweepy framework, you can download the tweets mentioning the hashtag #alphago. Initially, pull all the tweets that Twitter will give and then use the since ID to incrementally get the tweets.

  2. Then use application authentication for a higher rate. Twitter implements rate limiting, so the amount of tweets one can get without their firehose subscription is limited. Even then, I had collected approximately 300K tweets and 2 GB worth of data.

  3. Store the data in MongoDB. Twitter...