Book Image

Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning

By : Frank Kane
Book Image

Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning

By: Frank Kane

Overview of this book

Join Frank Kane, who worked on Amazon and IMDb’s machine learning algorithms, as he guides you on your first steps into the world of data science. Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning gives you the tools that you need to understand and explore the core topics in the field, and the confidence and practice to build and analyze your own machine learning models. With the help of interesting and easy-to-follow practical examples, Frank Kane explains potentially complex topics such as Bayesian methods and K-means clustering in a way that anybody can understand them. Based on Frank’s successful data science course, Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning empowers you to conduct data analysis and perform efficient machine learning using Python. Let Frank help you unearth the value in your data using the various data mining and data analysis techniques available in Python, and to develop efficient predictive models to predict future results. You will also learn how to perform large-scale machine learning on Big Data using Apache Spark. The book covers preparing your data for analysis, training machine learning models, and visualizing the final data analysis.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Spark introduction

Let's get started with a high-level overview of Apache Spark and see what it's all about, what it's good for, and how it works.

What is Spark? Well, if you go to the Spark website, they give you a very high-level, hand-wavy answer, "A fast and general engine for large-scale data processing." It slices, it dices, it does your laundry. Well, not really. But it is a framework for writing jobs or scripts that can process very large amounts of data, and it manages distributing that processing across a cluster of computing for you. Basically, Spark works by letting you load your data into these large objects called Resilient Distributed Data stores, RDDs. It can automatically perform operations that transform and create actions based on those RDDs, which you can think of as large data frames.

The beauty of it is that Spark will automatically...