Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By : Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK
Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By: Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK

Overview of this book

Processing big data in real time is challenging due to scalability, information inconsistency, and fault tolerance. Big Data Analysis with Python teaches you how to use tools that can control this data avalanche for you. With this book, you'll learn practical techniques to aggregate data into useful dimensions for posterior analysis, extract statistical measurements, and transform datasets into features for other systems. The book begins with an introduction to data manipulation in Python using pandas. You'll then get familiar with statistical analysis and plotting techniques. With multiple hands-on activities in store, you'll be able to analyze data that is distributed on several computers by using Dask. As you progress, you'll study how to aggregate data for plots when the entire data cannot be accommodated in memory. You'll also explore Hadoop (HDFS and YARN), which will help you tackle larger datasets. The book also covers Spark and explains how it interacts with other tools. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bootstrap your own Python environment, process large files, and manipulate data to generate statistics, metrics, and graphs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Big Data Analysis with Python
Preface

Summary


We have learned about the most common Python libraries used in data analysis and data science, which make up the Python data science stack. We learned how to ingest data, select it, filter it, and aggregate it. We saw how to export the results of our analysis and generate some quick graphs.

These are steps done in almost any data analysis. The ideas and operations demonstrated here can be applied to data manipulation with big data. Spark DataFrames were created with the pandas interface in mind, and several operations are performed in a very similar fashion in pandas and Spark, greatly simplifying the analysis process. Another great advantage of knowing your way around pandas is that Spark can convert its DataFrames to pandas DataFrames and back again, enabling analysts to work with the best tool for the job.

Before going into big data, we need to understand how to better visualize the results of our analysis. Our understanding of the data and its behavior can be greatly enhanced if we visualize it using the correct plots. We can draw inferences and see anomalies and patterns when we plot the data.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to choose the right graph for each kind of data and analysis, and how to plot it using Matplotlib and Seaborn.