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

Scaling out model inferencing

Another important aspect of the whole ML process, apart from data cleansing and model training and tuning, is the productionization of models itself. Despite having access to huge amounts of data, sometimes it is useful to downsample the data and train models on a smaller subset of the larger dataset. This could be due to reasons such as low signal-to-noise ratio, for example. In this, it is not necessary to scale up or scale out the model training process itself. However, since the raw dataset size is very large, it becomes necessary to scale out the actual model inferencing process to keep up with the large amount of raw data that is being generated.

Apache Spark, along with MLflow, can be used to score models trained using standard, non-distributed Python libraries like scikit-learn. An example of a model trained using scikit-learn and then productionized at scale using Spark is shown in the following code example:

import mlflow
from sklearn.model_selection...