What this book covers
Chapter 1, Big Data Analytics with Java, starts with providing an introduction to the core concepts of Hadoop and provides information on its key components. In easy-to-understand explanations, it shows how the components fit together and gives simple examples on the usage of the core components HDFS and Apache Spark. This chapter also talks about the different sources of data that can put their data inside Hadoop, their compression formats, and the systems that are used to analyze that data.
Chapter 2, First Steps in Data Analysis, takes the first steps towards the field of analytics on big data. We start with a simple example covering basic statistical analytic steps, followed by two popular algorithms for building association rules using the Apriori Algorithm and the FP-Growth Algorithm. For all case studies, we have used realistic examples of an online e-commerce store to give insights to users as to how these algorithms can be used in the real world.
Chapter 3, Data Visualization, helps you to understand what different types of charts there are for data analysis, how to use them, and why. With this understanding, we can make better decisions when exploring our data. This chapter also contains lots of code samples to show the different types of charts built using Apache Spark and the JFreeChart library.
Chapter 4, Basics of Machine Learning, helps you to understand the basic theoretical concepts behind machine learning, such as what exactly is machine learning, how it is used, examples of its use in real life, and the different forms of machine learning. If you are new to the field of machine learning, or want to brush up your existing knowledge on it, this chapter is for you. Here I will also show how, as a developer, you should approach a machine learning problem, including topics on feature extraction, feature selection, model testing, model selection, and more.
Chapter 5, Regression on Big Data, explains how you can use linear regression to predict continuous values and how you can do binary classification using logistic regression. A real-world case study of house price evaluation based on the different features of the house is used to explain the concepts of linear regression. To explain the key concepts of logistic regression, a real-life case study of detecting heart disease in a patient based on different features is used.
Chapter 6, Naive Bayes and Sentimental Analysis, explains a probabilistic machine learning model called Naive Bayes and also briefly explains another popular model called the support vector machine. The chapter starts with basic concepts such as Bayes Theorem and then explains how these concepts are used in Naive Bayes. I then use the model to predict the sentiment whether positive or negative in a set of tweets from Twitter. The same case study is then re-run using the support vector machine model.
Chapter 7, Decision Trees, explains that decision trees are like flowcharts and can be programmatically built using concepts such as Entropy or Gini Impurity. The golden egg in this chapter is a case study that shows how we can predict whether a person's loan application will be approved or not using decision trees.
Chapter 8, Ensembling on Big Data, explains how ensembling plays a major role in improving the performance of the predictive results. I cover different concepts related to ensembling in this chapter, including techniques such as how multiple models can be joined together using bagging or boosting thereby enhancing the predictive outputs. We also cover the highly popular and accurate ensemble of models, random forests and gradient-boosted trees. Finally, we predict loan default by users in a dataset of a real-world Lending Club (a real online lending company) using these models.
Chapter 9, Recommendation Systems, covers the particular concept that has made machine learning so popular and it directly impacts business as well. In this chapter, we show what recommendation systems are, what they can do, and how they are built using machine learning. We cover both types of recommendation systems: content-based and collaborative, and also cover their good and bad points. Finally, we cover two case studies using the MovieLens dataset to show recommendations to users for movies that they might like to see.
Chapter 10, Clustering and Customer Segmentation on Big Data, speaks about clustering and how it can be used by a real-world e-commerce store to segment their customers based on how valuable they are. I have covered both k-Means clustering and bisecting k-Means clustering, and used both of them in the corresponding case study on customer segmentation.
Chapter 11, Massive Graphs on Big Data, covers an interesting topic, graph analytics. We start with a refresher on graphs, with basic concepts, and later go on to explore the different forms of analytics that can be run on the graphs, whether path-based analytics involving algorithms such as breadth-first search, or connectivity analytics involving degrees of connection. A real-world flight dataset is then used to explore the different forms of graph analytics, showing analytical concepts such as finding top airports using the page rank algorithm.
Chapter 12, Real-Time Analytics on Big Data, speaks about real-time analytics by first seeing a few examples of real-time analytics in the real world. We also learn about the products that are used to build real-time analytics system on top of big data. We particularly cover the concepts of Impala, Spark Streaming, and Apache Kafka. Finally, we cover two real-life case studies on how we can build trending videos from data that is generated in real-time, and also do sentiment analysis on tweets by depicting a Twitter-like scenario using Apache Kafka and Spark Streaming.
Chapter 13, Deep Learning Using Big Data, speaks about the wide range of applications that deep learning has in real life whether it's self-driving cars, disease detection, or speech recognition software. We start with the very basics of what a biological neural network is and how it is mimicked in an artificial neural network. We also cover a lot of the theory behind artificial neurons and finally cover a simple case study of flower species detection using a multi-layer perceptron. We conclude the chapter with a brief introduction to the Deeplearning4j library and also cover a case study on handwritten digit classification using convolution neural networks.
