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

Introduction


In the previous chapter, we learned how to define a business problem from a data science perspective through a very structured approach, which included how to identify and understand business requirements, an approach to solutioning it, and how to build data pipelines and carry out analysis.

In this chapter, we will look at the reproducibility of computational work and research practices, which is a major challenge faced today across the industry, as well as by academics—especially in data science work, in which most of the data, complete datasets, and associated workflow cannot be accessed completely.

Today, most research and technical papers conclude with the approach used on the sample data, a brief mention of the methodology used, and a theoretical approach to a solution. Most of these works lack detailed calculations and step-by-step approaches. This is a very limited amount of knowledge for anyone reading it to be able to reproduce the same work that was carried out. This...