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

Standardizing continuous variables


Building a machine learning model using features that have significantly different ranges and resolutions (such as age and salary) might pose not only computational problems, but also model-convergence and coefficient-interpretability problems.

In this recipe, we will learn how to standardize continuous variables so they have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

Getting ready

To execute this recipe, you will need a working Spark environment. You will also have to have executed the previous recipe.

No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

To standardize the signal column we introduced in the previous recipe, we will use the .StandardScaler(...) method:

vec = feat.VectorAssembler(
    inputCols=['signal']
    , outputCol='signal_vec'
)

norm = feat.StandardScaler(
    inputCol=vec.getOutputCol()
    , outputCol='signal_norm'
    , withMean=True
    , withStd=True
)

norm_pipeline = Pipeline(stages=[vec, norm])
signal_norm = (
    norm_pipeline...