Spark for risk scoring

In this section, we will start with a real business case, and then describe how to prepare an Apache Spark environment to use R notebooks to work on this real life risk scoring project.

The use case

XST Corp provides loans and other financial assistance to millions of individuals who need the cash either to continue their business or to take care of some emergent personal needs. This company accepts applications online and then makes instant decisions on most of the received applications. For this purpose, they use the data collected from the online applications and data collected in the past in their data warehouse, along with additional data provided by third parties.

Their online applications provide identity data and some financial data of the applicants. The company's compiled data consists of information related to location, economy, and others. The third-party data has a lot of rich data related to past credit, current employment, and others.

This company...