Mastering Machine Learning with Spark 2.x

Unlock the complexities of machine learning algorithms in Spark to generate useful data insights through this data analysis tutorial

About This Book

• Process and analyze big data in a distributed and scalable way
• Write sophisticated Spark pipelines that incorporate elaborate extraction
• Build and use regression models to predict flight delays

Who This Book Is For

Are you a developer with a background in machine learning and statistics who is feeling limited by the current slow and "small data" machine learning tools? Then this is the book for you! In this book, you will create scalable machine learning applications to power a modern data-driven business using Spark. We assume that you already know the machine learning concepts and algorithms and have Spark up and running (whether on a cluster or locally) and have a basic knowledge of the various libraries contained in Spark.

What You Will Learn

• Use Spark streams to cluster tweets online
• Run the PageRank algorithm to compute user influence
• Perform complex manipulation of DataFrames using Spark
• Define Spark pipelines to compose individual data transformations
• Utilize generated models for off-line/on-line prediction
• Transfer the learning from an ensemble to a simpler Neural Network
• Understand basic graph properties and important graph operations
• Use GraphFrames, an extension of DataFrames to graphs, to study graphs using an elegant query language
• Use K-means algorithm to cluster movie reviews dataset

In Detail

The purpose of machine learning is to build systems that learn from data. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success; it is one of the key strategies to unlock growth in the challenging contemporary marketplace today. With the meteoric rise of machine learning, developers are now keen on finding out how can they make their Spark applications smarter.

This book gives you access to transform data into actionable knowledge. The book commences by defining machine learning primitives by the MLlib and H2O libraries. You will learn how to use Binary classification to detect the Higgs Boson particle in the huge amount of data produced by CERN particle collider and classify daily health activities using ensemble Methods for Multi-Class Classification.

Next, you will solve a typical regression problem involving flight delay predictions and write sophisticated Spark pipelines. You will analyze Twitter data with help of the doc2vec algorithm and K-means clustering. Finally, you will build different pattern mining models using MLlib, perform complex manipulation of DataFrames using Spark and Spark SQL, and deploy your app in a Spark streaming environment.

Style and approach

This book takes a practical approach to help you get to grips with using Spark for analytics and to implement machine learning algorithms. We'll teach you about advanced applications of machine learning through illustrative examples. These examples will equip you to harness the potential of machine learning, through Spark, in a variety of enterprise-grade systems.

Alex Tellez is a life-long data hacker/enthusiast with a passion for data science and its application to business problems. He has a wealth of experience working across multiple industries, including banking, health care, online dating, human resources, and online gaming. Alex has also given multiple talks at various AI/machine learning conferences, in addition to lectures at universities about neural networks. When he's not neck-deep in a textbook, Alex enjoys spending time with family, riding bikes, and utilizing machine learning to feed his French wine curiosity!

Max Pumperla is a data scientist and engineer specializing in deep learning and its applications. He currently works as a deep learning engineer at Skymind and is a co-founder of aetros.com. Max is the author and maintainer of several Python packages, including elephas, a distributed deep learning library using Spark. His open source footprint includes contributions to many popular machine learning libraries, such as keras, deeplearning4j, and hyperopt. He holds a PhD in algebraic geometry from the University of Hamburg.

Michal Malohlava, creator of Sparkling Water, is a geek and the developer; Java, Linux, programming languages enthusiast who has been developing software for over 10 years. He obtained his PhD from Charles University in Prague in 2012, and post doctorate from Purdue University.

During his studies, he was interested in the construction of not only distributed but also embedded and real-time, component-based systems, using model-driven methods and domain-specific languages. He participated in the design and development of various systems, including SOFA and Fractal component systems and the jPapabench control system.

Now, his main interest is big data computation. He participates in the development of the H2O platform for advanced big data math and computation, and its embedding into Spark engine, published as a project called Sparkling Water.