Michael Bowles

Tales of an unremarkable engineer and the characters he met on the way at the Royal Radar Establishment Malvern and Pershore, the Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough and Bedford, the Aircraft and Armament Evaluation Establishment Boscombe Down, and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

Machine Learning with Spark and Python Essential Techniques for Predictive Analytics, Second Edition simplifies ML for practical uses by focusing on two key algorithms. This new second edition improves with the addition of Spark—a ML framework from the Apache foundation. By implementing Spark, machine learning students can easily process much large data sets and call the spark algorithms using ordinary Python code. Machine Learning with Spark and Python focuses on two algorithm families (linear methods and ensemble methods) that effectively predict outcomes. This type of problem covers many use cases such as what ad to place on a web page, predicting prices in securities markets, or detecting credit card fraud. The focus on two families gives enough room for full descriptions of the mechanisms at work in the algorithms. Then the code examples serve to illustrate the workings of the machinery with specific hackable code.