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


If you have been part of the data industry for a while, you will understand the challenge of working with different data sources, analyzing them, and presenting them in consumable business reports. When using Spark on Python, you may have to read data from various sources, such as flat files, REST APIs in JSON format, and so on.

In the real world, getting data in the right format is always a challenge and several SQL operations are required to gather data. Thus, it is mandatory for any data scientist to know how to handle different file formats and different sources, and to carry out basic SQL operations and present them in a consumable format.

This chapter provides common methods for reading different types of data, carrying out SQL operations on it, doing descriptive statistical analysis, and generating a full analysis report. We will start with understanding how to read different kinds of data into PySpark and will then generate various analyses and plots on it.