One of our philosophies in Apache Spark is to provide rich and friendly built-in libraries so that users can easily assemble data pipelines. With Spark, and MLlib in particular, quickly gaining traction among data scientists and machine learning practitioners, we’re observing a growing demand for data analysis support outside of model fitting. To address this need, we have started to add scalable implementations of common statistical functions to facilitate various components of a data pipeline.
Scalable Collaborative Filtering with Apache Spark MLlib
Recommendation systems are among the most popular applications of machine learning. The idea is to predict whether a customer would like a certain item: a product, a movie, or a song. Scale is a key concern for recommendation systems, since computational complexity increases with the size of a company’s customer base. In this blog post, we discuss how Apache Spark MLlib enables building recommendation models from billions of records in just a few lines of Python (Scala/Java APIs also available).
New Features in MLlib in Apache Spark 1.0
MLlib is an Apache Spark component focusing on machine learning. It became a standard component of Spark in version 0.8 (Sep 2013). The…