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You're reading from  Practical Predictive Analytics

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781785886188
Edition1st Edition
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Ralph Winters
Ralph Winters
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Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters

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About Spark


At the time of writing, Spark is probably the most popular very large dataset architecture for predictive analytics. Spark is a distributed architecture which helps you manage your large data and makes it easier to analyze. Spark is built upon Hadoop and they share the same filesystem.

However, Spark is not based upon the MapReduce paradigm, and uses the resilient distributed dataset (RDD) structure in order to implement in-memory analytics and manage the parallel processing cluster across all of the nodes of the environment. What that means for analysts is that queries can be very quick, since data is retrieved from memory, which offers much quicker retrieval than disk access. Quicker access means more time for analysis, and less time waiting for results.

Here are some advantages of Spark:

  • Spark overcomes some of the limitations of memory-bound analytics, since it manages memory, and is able to optimize data access and querying.
  • Spark has its own machine learning library known as...
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Practical Predictive Analytics
Published in: Jun 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781785886188

Author (1)

author image
Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters