Book Image

PySpark Cookbook

By : Denny Lee, Tomasz Drabas
Book Image

PySpark Cookbook

By: Denny Lee, Tomasz Drabas

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source framework for efficient cluster computing with a strong interface for data parallelism and fault tolerance. The PySpark Cookbook presents effective and time-saving recipes for leveraging the power of Python and putting it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You’ll start by learning the Apache Spark architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You’ll then get familiar with the modules available in PySpark and start using them effortlessly. In addition to this, you’ll discover how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames, and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. You’ll then move on to using ML and MLlib in order to solve any problems related to the machine learning capabilities of PySpark and use GraphFrames to solve graph-processing problems. Finally, you will explore how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will be able to use the Python API for Apache Spark to solve any problems associated with building data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Predicting hours of work for census respondents


In this recipe, we will build a simple linear regression model that will aim to predict the number of hours each of the census respondents works per week. 

Getting ready

To execute this recipe, you need to have a working Spark environment. You would have already gone through the previous recipe where we created training and testing datasets for estimating regression models.

No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

Training models with MLlib is pretty straightforward. See the following code snippet:

workhours_model_lm = reg.LinearRegressionWithSGD.train(final_data_hours_train)

How it works...

As you can see, we first create the LinearRegressionWithSGD object and call its .train(...) method.

Note

For a very good overview of different derivatives of stochastic gradient descent, check this out: http://ruder.io/optimizing-gradient-descent/.

The first, and the only, required parameter we pass to the method is an RDD of labeled points that we created...