1. Cloudera Data
Science Challenge
Doug Needham Mark Nichols, P.E.

2. Introduction
 Doug Needham Doug's Linkedin @dougneedham
 Mark Nichols Mark’s LinkedIn

3. Data Science, Why does it matter?
 What is the only skill that matters for a data scientist?
 “the ability to use the resources available to them to solve a challenge.”
 Solving problems, the only skill you need to know
 The skill of solving problems.
 We both accomplished a lot in tackling this challenge. For some of the problems
we did well, for some we could improve.
 This challenge shows the ability to solve problems over and above the actual
“answers” we sought.
 I think too often we seek out people who have one particular skill or another, rather
than general problem solving abilities.
 Certainly there is a time and a place for expertise with a particular set of skills. But
the skill of adaptability is often overlooked.
 Think on this, the next time you are considering who you need to assist in solving a
problem.

4. Cloudera Certified Professional:
Data Scientist
 Intent of CCP:DS
 Demonstrate Knowledge in a Variety of Data
Science Topics
 Demonstrate the Knowledge at Scale
 Requirements
 Pass Cloudera’s Data Science Essentials Exam (DS-
200)
 Pass Cloudera’s Data Science Challenge (semi-
annual; use simulated data to solve real problems)
 Change coming in Q2 2015
SME Expertise
Math &
Statistics
Knowledge
Computer
Science
Skills
Data
Science
Machine
Learning
Reuters Article on CCP:DS certification
Data Acquisition
Data Evaluation
Data
Transformation
Machine Learning
Clustering
Classification
Model/ Selection
Feature Selection
Probability
Visualization
Optimization
Collaborative
Filtering
Topics

5. Fall 2014 Data Science Challenge
 Timeline: October 21, 2014 to January 21, 2015
 Each person sitting for the challenge has to submit individual
solutions for each problem.
 Problems:
 Problem 1: Smartfly – Predict probability of a flight being delayed.
 Problem 2: Almost Famous – Statistical analysis of web log data.
 Problem 3: Winklr – Who should follow whom.

6. Multiple Ways to Solve a Problem
Problem
100,000 FT High Overview of Solution Tools Used
Mark Doug
Smartfly (ML – binary
classification)
• Hive to Explore the Data
• Python & MapReduce to Format
and Clean the Input
• Spark MLLIB for Model
Data Science at the Command Line.
Scripts, counts, summaries.
“Pseudo Map-Reduce”
R plotting.
Spark MLLib for predictions.
Almost Famous (spam
filter & statistical
analysis)
• Python to Explore the Data
• Python to Filter and Answer
Questions
Data Science at the command line.
Scripts, counts, summaries.
“Pseudo Map-Reduce”
SciPY for particular functions.
Winklr (social network
analysis)
• Hive and Command Line to
Explore the Data
• Mahout, Spark, Command Line
and Python to develop a hybrid
recommender
Gephi, for analysis of subgraphs.
Python to format the data.
Spark GraphX for solution.
Shell scripts to get the data in the
required format

7. Smartfly – Problem Summary
 Motivation
 Client is an online travel service that provides timely travel information to their
customers
 Their product team has come up with an idea of using flight data to predict whether a
flight will be delayed and use that information to respond proactively.
 Given
 7,374,365 records of historic flight data at 279 airports and 17 airlines
 566,376 records of scheduled flight data
 Requirements
 Rank all scheduled flights in order of descending probability of delay

8. Smartfly – Raw Data (Starting Point)
 1-Unique Flight ID (int)
 2-Year (int)
 3-Month (int)
 4-Day of Month (int)
 5-Day of Week (int)
 6-Scheduled Departure (HHMM)
 7-Scheduled Arrival (HHMM)
 8-Airline (string)
 9-Flight Number (int)
 10-Tail Number (string)
 11-Plane Model (string)
 12-Seat Configuration (string)
 13-Departure Delay in Minutes (int)
 14-Origin Airport (string)
 15-Destination Airport (string)
 16-Distance Travelled in Miles (int)
 17-Taxi In Time in Minutes (int)
 18-Taxi Out Time in Minutes (int)
 19-Cancelled (Boolean)
 20-Cancellation Code (string)
Historic and Scheduled Data was provided in CSV format with the
following fields in each row:

9. Machine Learning Algorithms for
Binary Predictions (Potential Paths)
 http://spark.apache.org/docs/1.2.0/mllib-guide.html

10. Model Evaluation Criteria
 Set the evaluation criteria prior to running
any models, similar to setting the null and
alternate hypothesis prior to conducting an
experiment
 Selected criteria: Area Under Receiver
Operating Characteristic Curve (auROC)
 Compare different models
 Independent of cutoff
 No cutoff assumptions required

11. Model Evaluation Criteria
 Area Under Receiver Operating
Characteristic Curve (auROC)
 Weighted Confusion Matrix

12. Data Exploration
 Used Hive primarily
SELECT Max(distance), Min(distance)
FROM sfhist
 Determined range of values for
each field
 Looked at delays by airline, airport,
plane model…
 Are there mismatches in data (ex.
Cancelled = 0, but a valid Cancel
Code is present)

13. Input Data Manipulation
 Format to input for ML algorithm (LIBSVM format) using Python and
Map Reduce
 Created dictionaries of airports, airlines, plane models, seat
configurations & holidays
 LIBSVM – efficient sparse matrix
 0 10:1 13:1 46:1 51:1 52:1 67:1 77:1 82:1 106:1 674:1 804:1 3225:1
 1 9:1 42:1 45:1 54:1 54:1 75:1 77:1 84:1 291:1 458:1 801:1 3891:1
 Deal with errors & omissions in data
 Validate
 Manual calculation at the head/tail/changes
 Verify the correct number of records
Response
0 = no delay
1 = delayed
Features
1-12: Month
13-43: Day
…
1K-7K: Tailnumber
7001+: Holidays

14. Train the Model
 Split the historic data into training and testing subsets
 Split randomly
 Split based on time
 Run the model in Spark
 Load the formatted input
 Set model parameters
 Run the model (train the SVM or Logistic Regression Model)

15. Test the model
 Use the model to predict delays in the test data and compare to determine the
auROC (Spark)
 Repeat using a range of iterations, model types (SVM/Log), regularization
parameter (size of step), and regularization technique (L1/L2)
 Results
 Worst: auROC = 0.51 SVM using only flight times and default optimization settings
 Best: auROC = 0.68
 Logisitic Regressioin
 L2 Reglarization (2000 iterations, step = 0.0001)
 Categorical input for: month, day, weekday, time of day (6hr blocks), departing airport,
arrival airport, airline, seat configuration, flight number (type of flight), & holidays
 Represents a 36% improvement over random selection
 Predict the Scheduled for Submission

16. Smartfly Review
 Ability to use all of the data
 Unable to run a SVM / logistic regression model in R with ~ 6million rows
 Spark completed final model in ~ 10 min
 Can be used for any binary decisions process
 Issue loan or not
 Purchase stock or not
 Other ML algorithms, the basic process remains the same
 Linear regression – predict a value
 Clustering – segment your data for reporting
 Collaborative filter – recommend products to customers…

17. Winklr – Problem Summary
 Who should Follow whom?
 Winklr is a curiously popular social network for fans of the sitcom Happy Days.
Users can post photos, write messages, and most importantly, follow each other’s
posts and content. This helps users keep up with new content from their favorite
users on the site.
 Basically Winklr is a site that is set up similar to Twitter. We want to provide
recommendations on who to follow. We know that some people have “clicked”
on another user (I interpret this as a “Favorite”, or a “Re-Tweet”)

18. Make sense of this:

19. My solution
 Type of problem: Graph Analysis
 Create a Master Graph.
 Run Page Rank to identify centrality.
 Create many small graphs for individual users.
 Mask the Master Graph, and PageRank Graph.
 Multiply out Centrality, number of in Degrees for a possible followers,
and the inverse of the length of the path away from this particular
user to a candidate vertex to be followed.
 This code runs in about 60 hours using Spark GraphX.
 Code: Problem3.sh, and AnalyzeGraph.scala

20. Doug’s Problem Solving approach
 This is the approach I took, and may or may not be useful for others to apply.
 Analysis. I started with some basic numbers, and just browsing through the data with the “Data Science at the Command
line toolkit”. This is very handy for getting a feel for things.
 Based on some general understanding this analysis provided, create a “pipeline”
 Generally the data has to be transformed to a usable structure for the particular method of solving the problem.
 Do some basics with the problem solving method, Stats, ML, Graph, etc…
 Get some data back out of that tool, then format output to specification.
 Iterate.
 I did this for problem 1, moved to problem 2, then finally problem 3. Then went back to 1, back to 2, back to 3.
 This method allowed me to give some “space” to myself, and actually look at the each problem with fresh eyes on more
than one occasion.
 Breaking the basics down of Input, Process, Output for each problem allowed me to have “working” code for each
problem really quickly, then through tuning, analysis, research, and some time to think about the problem, I was able to
come up with each unique solution.
 It also allows me to refactor the code, having given each problem time to “rest”.
 Very much like a painting, broad strokes first, details emerge as the painting progresses.
 Another benefit is, if I am able to get the data all the way through the pipeline, it becomes obvious where the
performance bottlenecks are for the pipeline.
 This method does take a bit of time.

21. Graph Analysis
 As Graphs get really large it becomes difficult to visualize them.
 However, I was able to “subset” the master graph based on the
recommendation output of my process.
 I was expecting to see one big clump of nodes tightly connected.
This would be the “Target” to follow.
 I was also expecting to see two smaller clumps of nodes, loosely
connected to the larger clump. These are the “followers”, as we
make a recommendation to them to follow the more popular node,
they will be closer connected to this user.
 Here is the output from Gephi that shows whether the code worked
or not.

22. This is what I expected to see

23. Looks good, except I was wrong.
 The challenge is looking for those “Likely” to follow someone.
 So this part called for something a little different than what I coded.
 It appears they were looking for the neighbors of the people that
were already being followed.
 This is a much less complicated problem than I actually solved.
 I look forward to seeing what Data Science Challenge 4 will look
like.

24. Where to go from here?
 Spark.
 Scala.
 Learn these topics.
 Teach these topics.
 Especially for folks planning on sitting for Data Science challenge 4: Learn
Scala. Learn Spark.
 Oh, and keep studying about Graphs…
 For an example of what not to do: Doug's github link
 Recent change – This is apparently the final Data Science challenge. Future
CCP:DS certs will be based on a testing format.