Preface

Efficient business decisions with an accurate understanding of business data help to deliver better performance across products and services. This book will help you to leverage the popular Scala libraries and tools to perform core data analysis tasks with ease.

The book begins with a quick overview of the building blocks of a standard data analysis process. You will learn how to perform basic tasks such as the extraction, staging, validation, cleaning, and shaping of datasets. You will later deep dive into the data exploration and visualization areas of the data analysis life cycle. You will make use of popular Scala libraries such as Saddle, Breeze, and Vegas to process your datasets. You will learn statistical methods for deriving meaningful insights from data. You will also learn how to create applications for Apache Spark 2.x on complex data analysis, in real time. You will discover traditional machine learning (ML) techniques for doing data analysis. 

By the end of this book, you will be capable of handling large sets of structured and unstructured data, performing exploratory analysis, and building efficient Scala applications to discover and deliver insights.