Book Image

Essential PySpark for Scalable Data Analytics

By : Sreeram Nudurupati
Book Image

Essential PySpark for Scalable Data Analytics

By: Sreeram Nudurupati

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is a unified data analytics engine designed to process huge volumes of data quickly and efficiently. PySpark is Apache Spark's Python language API, which offers Python developers an easy-to-use scalable data analytics framework. Essential PySpark for Scalable Data Analytics starts by exploring the distributed computing paradigm and provides a high-level overview of Apache Spark. You'll begin your analytics journey with the data engineering process, learning how to perform data ingestion, cleansing, and integration at scale. This book helps you build real-time analytics pipelines that help you gain insights faster. You'll then discover methods for building cloud-based data lakes, and explore Delta Lake, which brings reliability to data lakes. The book also covers Data Lakehouse, an emerging paradigm, which combines the structure and performance of a data warehouse with the scalability of cloud-based data lakes. Later, you'll perform scalable data science and machine learning tasks using PySpark, such as data preparation, feature engineering, and model training and productionization. Finally, you'll learn ways to scale out standard Python ML libraries along with a new pandas API on top of PySpark called Koalas. By the end of this PySpark book, you'll be able to harness the power of PySpark to solve business problems.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Data Engineering
6
Section 2: Data Science
13
Section 3: Data Analysis

Model serving and inferencing

Model serving and inferencing is the most important step of the entire ML life cycle. This is where the models that have been build are deployed to business applications so that we can draw inferences from them. Model serving and inferencing can happen in two ways: using batch processing in offline mode or in real time in online mode.

Offline model inferencing

Offline model inferencing is the process of generating predictions from a ML model using batch processing. The batch processing inference jobs run periodically on a recurring schedule, producing predictions on a new set of fresh data every time. These predictions are then stored in a database or on the data lake and are consumed by business applications in an offline or asynchronous way. An example of batch inferencing would be data-driven customer segmentation being used by the marketing teams at an organization or a retailer predicting customer lifetime value. These use cases do not demand...