Parallelizing processing with Incanter

In the upcoming chapters, many recipes will feature Incanter. One of its good features is that it uses the Parallel Colt Java library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/parallelcolt/) to actually handle its processing. So when you use a lot of matrix, statistical, or other functions, they're automatically executed on multiple threads.

For this, we'll revisit the Virginia housing-unit census data from the Managing program complexity with STM recipe in Chapter 3, Managing Complexity with Concurrent Programming. This time, we'll fit it to a linear regression.

Getting ready

We need to add Incanter to our list of dependencies in our Leiningen project.clj file:

(defproject parallel-data "0.1.0"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.6.0"]
                 [incanter "1.5.5"]])

We also need to pull these libraries into our REPL or script:

(use '(incanter core datasets io optimize charts stats))

We'll use the data file from the Managing program complexity with STM...