Chapter 3. A Holistic View on Spark

After setting the Apache Spark system up as per Chapter 1, Spark for Machine Learning, and completing our data preparation work according to what we discussed in Chapter 2, Data Preparation for Spark ML, we will now move to a new stage of utilizing Apache Spark-based systems to turn data into insight.

According to the research done by Gartner and others, many organizations lost a large amount of value simply due to the lack of a holistic view of their business. In this chapter, we will review machine learning methods and processes of obtaining a holistic view of business. Then, we will discuss how Apache Spark fits in to making the related computing easy and fast and, at the same time, illustrate this process of developing holistic views from data using Apache Spark computing with one real-life example step by step.