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Spark MLlib – Machine Learning Library Of Apache Spark

Published on May 22,2019
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Spark MLlib is Apache Spark’s Machine Learning component. One of the major attractions of Spark is the ability to scale computation massively, and that is exactly what you need for machine learning algorithms. But the limitation is that all machine learning algorithms cannot be effectively parallelized. Each algorithm has its own challenges for parallelization, whether it is task parallelism or data parallelism.

Having said that, Spark is becoming the de-facto platform for building machine learning algorithms and applications.  Well, you can check out the Spark course curriculum curated by Industry Experts before going ahead with the blog. The developers working on the Spark MLlib are implementing more and more machine algorithms in a scalable and concise manner in the Spark framework. Through this blog, we will learn the concepts of Machine Learning, Spark MLlib, its utilities, algorithms and a complete use case of Movie Recommendation System. 

The following topics will be covered in this blog:

  1. What is Machine Learning?
  2. Spark MLlib Overview
  3. Spark MLlib Tools
  4. MLlib Algorithms
  5. Use Case – Movie Recommendation System

What is Machine Learning?


Machine Learning - Spark MLlib - EdurekaFigure: Machine Learning tools

Machine learning is closely related to computational statistics, which also focuses on prediction-making through the use of computers. It has strong ties to mathematical optimization, which delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field. Within the field of data analytics, machine learning is a method used to devise complex models and algorithms that lend themselves to a prediction which in commercial use is known as predictive analytics.

There are three categories of Machine learning tasks:

  2. Unsupervised Learning: Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning algorithm used to draw inferences from datasets consisting of input data without labeled responses.
  3. Reinforcement Learning: A computer program interacts with a dynamic environment in which it must perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle or playing a game against an opponent). The program is provided feedback in terms of rewards and punishments as it navigates its problem space. This concept is called reinforcement learning.

Spark MLlib Overview

Spark MLlib is used to perform machine learning in Apache Spark. MLlib consists popular algorithms and utilities.

MLlib Overview:

  • spark.mllib contains the original API built on top of RDDs. It is currently in maintenance mode.
  • provides higher level API built on top of DataFrames for constructing ML pipelines. is the primary Machine Learning API for Spark at the moment.

Spark MLlib Tools

Spark MLlib provides the following tools:

  • ML Algorithms: ML Algorithms form the core of MLlib. These include common learning algorithms such as classification, regression, clustering and collaborative filtering.
  • Featurization: Featurization includes feature extraction, transformation, dimensionality reduction and selection.
  • Pipelines: Pipelines provide tools for constructing, evaluating and tuning ML Pipelines.
  • Persistence: Persistence helps in saving and loading algorithms, models and Pipelines.
  • Utilities: Utilities for linear algebra, statistics and data handling.

MLlib Algorithms

The popular algorithms and utilities in Spark MLlib are:

  1. Basic Statistics
  2. Regression
  3. Classification
  4. Recommendation System
  5. Clustering
  6. Dimensionality Reduction
  7. Feature Extraction
  8. Optimization

Let us look at some of these in detail. 

Basic Statistics

Basic Statistics includes the most basic of machine learning techniques. These include:

  1. Summary Statistics: Examples include mean, variance, count, max, min and numNonZeros.
  2. Correlations: Spearman and Pearson are some ways to find correlation.
  3. Stratified Sampling: These include sampleBykey and sampleByKeyExact.
  4. Hypothesis Testing: Pearson’s chi-squared test is an example of hypothesis testing.
  5. Random Data Generation: RandomRDDs, Normal and Poisson are used to generate random data.





Classification is the problem of identifying to which of a set of categories (sub-populations) a new observation belongs, on the basis of a training set of data containing observations (or instances) whose category membership is known. It is an example of pattern recognition.

Here, an example would be assigning a given email into “spam” or “non-spam” classes or assigning a diagnosis to a given patient as described by observed characteristics of the patient (gender, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.). 

Recommendation System

A recommendation system is a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the “rating” or “preference” that a user would give to an item. Recommender systems have become increasingly popular in recent years, and are utilized in a variety of areas including movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general.

Recommender systems typically produce a list of recommendations in one of two ways – through collaborative and content-based filtering or the personality-based approach. 

  1. Collaborative Filtering approaches building a model from a user’s past behavior (items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users. This model is then used to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in.
  2. Content-Based Filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties. 

Further, these approaches are often combined as Hybrid Recommender Systems.


Clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). So, it is the main task of exploratory data mining, and a common technique for statistical data analysis, used in many fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression and computer graphics.

Dimensionality Reduction

Dimensionality Reduction is the process of reducing the number of random variables under consideration, via obtaining a set of principal variables. It can be divided into feature selection and feature extraction.

  1. Feature Selection: Feature selection finds a subset of the original variables (also called features or attributes). 
  2. Feature Extraction: This transforms the data in the high-dimensional space to a space of fewer dimensions. The data transformation may be linear, as in Principal Component Analysis(PCA), but many nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques also exist.

Feature Extraction

Feature Extraction starts from an initial set of measured data and builds derived values (features) intended to be informative and non-redundant, facilitating the subsequent learning and generalization steps, and in some cases leading to better human interpretations. This is related to dimensionality reduction.


Optimization is the selection of the best element (with regard to some criterion) from some set of available alternatives. 

In the simplest case, an optimization problem consists of maximizing or minimizing a real function by systematically choosing input values from within an allowed set and computing the value of the function. The generalization of optimization theory and techniques to other formulations comprises a large area of applied mathematics. More generally, optimization includes finding “best available” values of some objective function given a defined domain (or input), including a variety of different types of objective functions and different types of domains.

Use Case – Movie Recommendation System

Problem Statement: To build a Movie Recommendation System which recommends movies based on a user’s preferences using Apache Spark.

Our Requirements:

So, let us assess the requirements to build our movie recommendation system:

  1. Process huge amount of data
  2. Input from multiple sources
  3. Easy to use
  4. Fast processing

As we can assess our requirements, we need the best Big Data tool to process large data in short time. Therefore, Apache Spark is the perfect tool to implement our Movie Recommendation System.

Let us now look at the Flow Diagram for our system.

Use Case Flow Diagram - Spark MLlib - EdurekaAs we can see, the following uses Streaming from Spark Streaming. We can stream in real time or read data from Hadoop HDFS.

Getting Dataset:

For our Movie Recommendation System, we can get user ratings from many popular websites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Times Movie Ratings. This dataset is available in many formats such as CSV files, text files and databases. We can either stream the data live from the websites or download and store them in our local file system or HDFS.

Getting Dataset - Spark MLlib - Edureka


The below figure shows how we can collect dataset from popular websites.

BookMyShow - Spark MLlib - Edureka

Once we stream the data into Spark, it looks somewhat like this.

Movie Dataset - Spark MLlib - Edureka

Machine Learning:

The whole recommendation system is based on Machine Learning algorithm Alternating Least Squares. Here, ALS is a type of regression analysis where regression is used to draw a line amidst the data points in such a way so that the sum of the squares of the distance from each data point is minimized. Thus, this line is then used to predict the values of the function where it meets the value of the independent variable.

Regression ALS - Spark MLlib - Edureka

The blue line in the diagram is the best-fit regression line. For this line, the value of the dimension D is minimum. All other red lines will always be farther from the dataset as a whole.

Spark MLlib Implementation:

  1. We will use Collaborative Filtering(CF) to predict the ratings for users for particular movies based on their ratings for other movies.
  2. We then collaborate this with other users’ rating for that particular movie.
  3. To get the following results from our Machine Learning, we need to use Spark SQL’s DataFrame, Dataset and SQL Service.

Here is the pseudo code for our program:

import org.apache.spark.mllib.recommendation.ALS
import org.apache.spark.mllib.recommendation.Rating
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
//Import other necessary packages

object Movie {
def main(args: Array[String]) {

val conf = new SparkConf().setAppName("Movie").setMaster("local[2]")
val sc = new SparkContext(conf)
val rawData = sc.textFile(" *Read Data from Movie CSV file* ")

val rawRatings = *Split rawData on tab delimiter* )
val ratings = { *Map case array of User, Movie and Rating* }

//Training the data
val model = ALS.train(ratings, 50, 5, 0.01)
val predictedRating = *Predict for User 789 for movie 123*
val userId = *User 789*
val K = 10
val topKRecs = model.recommendProducts( *Recommend for User for the particular value of K* )
val movies = sc.textFile(" *Read Movie List Data* ")
val titles = => line.split("|").take(2)).map(array => (array(0).toInt,array(1))).collectAsMap()
val moviesForUser = ratings.*Search for User 789*
val sqlContext= *Create SQL Context*
val moviesRecommended = sqlContext.*Make a DataFrame of recommended movies*
sqlContext.sql("Select count(*) from moviesRecommendedTable").foreach(println)
moviesForUser. *Sort the ratings for User 789* .map( *Map the rating to movie title* ). *Print the rating*
val results = moviesForUser.sortBy(-_.rating).take(30).map(rating => (titles(rating.product), rating.rating))

Once we generate predictions, we can use Spark SQL to store the results into an RDBMS system. Further, this can be displayed on a web application.


Movie Results - Spark MLlib - EdurekaFigure: Movies recommended for User 77

Hurray! We have thus successfully created a Movie Recommendation System using Apache Spark. With this, we have covered just one of the many popular algorithms Spark MLlib has to offer. We will learn more about Machine Learning in the upcoming blogs on Data Science Algorithms.

Taking forward, you can continue learning Apache Spark with Spark Tutorial, Spark Streaming Tutorial, and Spark Interview Questions. Edureka is dedicated towards providing the best learning experience possible online.

Do check out our Apache Spark Certification Training if you wish to learn Spark and build a career in the domain of Spark and build expertise to perform large-scale Data Processing using RDD, Spark Streaming, SparkSQL, MLlib, GraphX and Scala with real life use-cases.


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