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

Feature selection

Feature selection is a technique that involves reducing the number of features in the machine learning process while leveraging lesser data and also improving the accuracy of the trained model. Feature selection is the process of either automatically or manually selecting only those features that contribute the most to the prediction variable that you are interested in. Feature selection is an important aspect of machine learning, as irrelevant or semi-relevant features can gravely impact model accuracy.

Apache Spark MLlib comes packaged with a few feature selectors, including VectorSlicer, ChiSqSelector, UnivariateFeatureSelector, and VarianceThresholdSelector. Let's explore how to implement feature selection within Apache Spark using the following code example that utilizes ChiSqSelector to select the optimal features given the label column that we are trying to predict:

from pyspark.ml.feature import ChiSqSelector
chisq_selector=ChiSqSelector(numTopFeatures...