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Learning PySpark
book

Learning PySpark

by Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee
February 2017
Intermediate to advanced
274 pages
5h 58m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Learning PySpark

Getting to know your data

In order to build a statistical model in an informed way, an intimate knowledge of the dataset is necessary. Without knowing the data it is possible to build a successful model, but it is then a much more arduous task, or it would require more technical resources to test all the possible combinations of features. Therefore, after spending the required 80% of the time cleaning the data, we spend the next 15% getting to know it!

Descriptive statistics

I normally start with descriptive statistics. Even though the DataFrames expose the .describe() method, since we are working with MLlib, we will use the .colStats(...) method.

Note

A word of warning: the .colStats(...) calculates the descriptive statistics based on a sample. For ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781786463708