Logistic Regression
This is an iterative machine learning algorithm that seeks to find the best hyperplane that separates two sets of points in a multi-dimensional feature space. It can be used to classify messages into spam vs non-spam, for example. Because the algorithm applies the same MapReduce operation repeatedly to the same dataset, it benefits greatly from caching the input data in RAM across iterations.
val points = spark.textFile(...).map(parsePoint).cache()
var w = Vector.random(D) // current separating plane
for (i <- 1 to ITERATIONS) {
val gradient = points.map(p =>
(1 / (1 + exp(-p.y*(w dot p.x))) - 1) * p.y * p.x
).reduce(_ + _)
w -= gradient
}
println("Final separating plane: " + w)
Note that w gets shipped automatically to the cluster with every map call.
The graph below compares the performance of this Spark program against a Hadoop implementation on 30 GB of data on an 80-core cluster, showing the benefit of in-memory caching:
