Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By : Rishi Yadav
Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By: Rishi Yadav

Overview of this book

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data. Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark. Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Doing classification using decision trees


Decision trees are the most intuitive among machine-learning algorithms. We use decision trees in our daily lives all the time.

Decision tree algorithms have a lot of useful features:

  • Easy to understand and interpret
  • Work with both categorical and continuous features
  • Work with missing features
  • Do not require feature scaling

Decision tree algorithms work in an upside-down order in which an expression containing a feature is evaluated at every level and this splits the dataset into two categories. We will help you understand this with a simple dumb charades example, which most of us may have played in college. I guessed an animal and asked my coworker to ask me questions to work out my choice. Here's how her questioning went:

  • Q1: Is it a big animal?

Answer: Yes.

  • Q2: Does this animal live for more than 40 years?

Answer: Yes.

  • Q3: Is this animal an elephant?

Answer: Yes.

This is obviously an oversimplified case in which she knew I had postulated an elephant (what...