A few days ago a friend asked me the following question: how to efficiently extract some specific lines from a large text file, possibily compressed by Gzip? He mentioned that he tried some R functions such as read.table(skip = ...), but found that reading the data was too slow. Hence he was looking for some alternative ways to extracting the data.
This is a common task in preprocessing large data sets, since in data exploration, very often we want to peek at a small subset of the whole data to gain some insights.
This semester I’m taking a course in big data computing using Scala/Spark, and we are asked to finish a course project related to big data analysis. Since statistical modeling heavily relies on linear algebra, I investigated some existing libraries in Scala/Java that deal with matrix and linear algebra algorithms.
1. Set-up Scala/Java libraries are usually distributed as *.jar files. To use them in Scala, we can create a directory to hold them and set up the environment variable to let Scala know about this path.