Data exploration

In this recipe, we'll see how to explore data.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need a running Spark cluster in any one of the modes, that is, local, standalone, YARN, or Mesos. For installing Spark on a standalone cluster, please refer to http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/spark-standalone.html. Also, include the Spark MLlib package in the build.sbt file so that it downloads the related libraries and the API can be used. Install Hadoop (optionally), Scala, and Java.

How to do it…

1. After variable identification, let's try to do some data exploration and come up with inferences about the data. Here is the code which does data exploration:

               // Basic Statistics for numerical variables 
               val summary_stats = sales_data.describe() 
               println("Summary Statistics") 
               summary_stats.show() 
          
               // Unique values in each field 
               val columnNames = sales_data.columns 
   ...